In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the concepts of graph transformation and
graph grammars started to become of interest in picture processing and computer
science. The main idea was to generalize well-known rewriting techniques
from strings and trees to graphs, leading to graph transformations and
graph grammars. In particular, the concepts of algebraic graph transformation
gained considerable importance in the early years and have done so even
more in the last decade. Today, algebraic graph transformation techniques are
playing a central role in theoretical computer science, as well as in several applied
areas, such as software engineering, concurrent and distributed systems,
and visual modeling techniques and model transformations