Pragmatic and Semantic Aspects of a Module Concept for Graph Transformation Systems

The paper presents a conceptual framework for a module concept for graph transformation systems from a software engineering as well as from a theoretical point of view. The basic idea is to reuse concepts, which are known within or without the graph grammar field, to structure large specifications. These are the concept of distributed graph transformation systems, the concept of inheritance of specifications, and the import-export-interface concept. All these concepts are presented in a uniform framework based on the syntactical notion of a graph class specification and its semantics given by a graph transformation system. This is the basis for an explicit integration of these concepts and a corresponding specification language, to be discussed in a subsequent paper.