A Textual DSL for creating Visual Diagrams

May 02, 2009

I have been playing around for a couple of minutes with yUML, an online service by Tobin Harris for creating UML diagrams using a textual input language. The diagram below is generated while you load this page. The input needed to generate the diagram is the following list of relations:

  [Publication]++->*[Author], 
  [AbstractAuthor]^[Author], 
  [AbstractAuthor]*<->1[Person], 
  [AbstractAuthor]*<->1[Affiliation], 
  [Person]*->*[Publication], 
  [Publication]^[PrintPublication], 
  [PrintPublication]^[Article], 
  [PrintPublication]^[InProceedings], 
  [Publication]^[PublishedVolume], 
  [PublishedVolume]^[Proceedings], 
  [InProceedings]<->[Proceedings], 
  [AbstractAuthor]^[Editor], 
  [PublishedVolume]++->*[Editor], 
  [Person]*->*[PublishedVolume], 
  [PublishedVolume]^[Book], 
  [PrintPublication]^[InCollection], 
  [Book]<->*[InCollection] .

This diagram documents a (small) subset of the data model underlying the researchr.org application for bibliography sharing and reviewing.

[diagram]