Towards extensible graphical formalisms

Discusses how to tailor a graphical notation on top of a kernel formal (graphical) specification language. The goal is to allow an environment supporting formal specifications written in a kernel formal notation to be extended to support additional, application domain-oriented graphical notations. The semantics of the newly defined notation is given by a translation scheme into the kernel notation. Our approach is founded on high-level Petri nets, the kernel formalism, and graph grammars, which define the new graphical notations and their translation into target nets. The paper provides examples of the definition of Statecharts on top of the kernel formalism.