Integration of Declarative and Algorithmic Approaches for Layout Creation

To be useful for a diagram-based interactive visualization system, a layout creation method should satisfy many requirements including user controllability, computational efficiency, flexibility and reusability. The layout created by the method should also be readable, and should conform to the semantics and syntax to the application. Unfortunately, the two traditional approaches (algorithmic and declarative) to layout creation are inadequate to meet these requirements. This paper illustrates a novel layout creation approach which integrates these two traditional approaches and satisfies the requirements mentioned above.