6533b837fe1ef96bd12a31e6

RESEARCH PRODUCT

XCDL: an XML-oriented visual composition definition language

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International audience; XML data flow has reached beyond the world of computer science and has spread to other areas such as data communication, e-commerce and instant messaging. Therefore, manipulating this data by non expert programmers is becoming imperative. On one hand, Mashups have emerged a few years ago, providing users with visual tools for web data manipulation but not necessarily XML specific. Mashups have been leaning towards functional composition but no formal languages have yet been defined. On the other hand, visual languages for XML have been emerging since the standardization of XML, and mostly relying on querying XML data for extraction or structure transformations. These languages are mainly based on existing textual XML languages, have limited expressiveness and do not provide non expert programmers with means to manipulate XML data. In this paper, we define a generic visual language called XCDL based on Colored Petri Nets allowing non expert programmers to compose manipulation operations. The language is adapted to XML, providing users with means to compose XML oriented operations. The language core syntax is presented here along with an implemented prototype based on it.