A visual programming language for XML manipulation

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 and has emerged two alternatives. 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 definitions 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, they 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 XML manipulations range from simple data selection/projection to data modification (insertion, removal, obfuscation, etc.). The language is oriented to deal with XML data (XML documents and fragments), providing users with means to compose XML oriented operations. The language core syntax is presented here along with an implemented prototype based on it.

► We develop a formal language for Manipulating XML-based data by non-experts.
► Language is based on Petri-Nets providing synchronization and parallel executions.
► Approach follows the natural human thinking process.
► Language is defined generic and adaptable to any structured data.