KIELER: A Text-First Framework for Automatic Diagramming of Complex Systems

In Model-Driven Engineering, editing models is typically not merely a purely textual endeavor, but rather a mix between textual and graphical editors and views. Both have their advantages and use cases where either textual or diagrammatic representations are better suited to edit and understand models. Therefore, a modeling framework offering the best of both worlds can be advantageous. We define the text-first approach to combine the textual and diagrammatic representations by automatically synthesizing the textual model into a diagram. We present the KIELER text-first diagramming framework and its take on current challenges for model visualization and compare it to the diagram-first approach, as exemplified by the GLSP framework.