Flowgrapher: generation of conceptual graphs from flowcharts

Abstract

This project is part of the Automatic Specification Interpreter (ASPIN), a tool currently under development, that takes the various forms of informal specifications and creates formal engineering models from them. ASPIN has a long-term goal of providing an automated system for digital system synthesis from informal specifications. This report describes an algorithm and a program, flowgrapher, that generates conceptual graphs from requirements expressed as flowcharts captured with a commercial tool. Generation of conceptual graphs from flowcharts is done in two stages. First the flowchart is drawn using Viewlogic's Viewdraw and a netlist representation of the flowchart is obtained. Next, this netlist is parsed to obtain the successor/predecessor relations between the various flowchart blocks and these relations are used to develop the conceptual graph representation of the flowchart. Flowgrapher has been implemented in the C programming language under the Unix environment.