The document discusses Picto Web, a tool designed for visualizing complex models through diverse and dynamic visual representations. It highlights the challenges of creating visualizations that cater to different user needs while maintaining efficiency and up-to-date information. The paper elaborates on the tool's capabilities, including on-demand view regeneration, caching mechanisms, and support for various diagram types, with a focus on practical applications and ease of use.

1. Picto Web:
A Tool for Complex
Model Exploration
A. Yohannis, D. Kolovos, A. García-Domínguez,
C. J. Fernández Candel
MODELS 2022 - Wednesday October 26th, 2022

2. Visualizing complex models
● A complex model has many different types of elements,
involved in non-trivial relationships
● Visualisations can help understand such models, but:
○ A single visualisation with everything can be overwhelming
○ A single visualisation is also computationally hard to lay out!
● Different users will want different visualisations
○ All served from the same model
○ We may want to reuse computed visualisations for repeated requests
● Visualisations need to stay up to date when changes happen

3. Picto: the original tool
● Picto is an Eclipse tool generating transient viz on demand
● A .picto file defines a set of visualisations using EGX scripts
● An EGX script orchestrates EGL model-to-text transformations

4. Picto Web: this paper
● Port of Picto to the Web, watching model folders
● Regenerates views upon changes, notifying clients
● Caches views for repeated requests
● Docker image available for ease of use - github.com/epsilonlabs/picto-web

5. Demo time!
● Social network (Flexmi): Graphviz/Pinset viz, change detection
○ The other social network example is the same, but with models in XMI format
● Class diagrams (ecorediagram):
○ PlantUML global / per-class visualisations
● Class diagrams (ecd.flexmi):
○ Flexmi models are used to specify custom subsets for diagrams
● Sequence diagrams (minisd):
○ Other PlantUML visualisations, using tree paths to drill into alt combinations
● Table-based metamodel docs (egldoc): HTML visualisations

6. Thank you!
Sources: https://github.com/epsilonlabs/picto-web
a.garcia-dominguez@york.ac.uk (me)
alfa.yohannis@york.ac.uk (lead dev)