Tool Support for the Navigation in Graphical Models

Abstract

Graphical models are omnipresent in the software engineering field, but most current graphical modeling languages do not scale with the increasing size and complexity of today’s systems. The navigation in the diagrams becomes a major problem especially if different aspects of the system are scattered over multiple, only loosely coupled diagrams.
In this paper we present the hierarchical navigation capabilities of the Adora modeling tool. The user of this tool can freely control the level of detail in different parts of the model to reduce the size and complexity of the diagrams being displayed. Our fisheye visualization technique makes it possible to integrate all modeling aspects (structure, data, behavior, etc.) in one coherent model while keeping the size and complexity of the diagrams within reasonable limits.