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A Fully Formalized Theory for Describing Visual Notations

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Visual Language Theory

Abstract

This chapter addresses issues in visual language theory with the help of logic formalisms that were developed for reasoning tasks by the artificial intelligence and spatial databases community, especially for spatial and diagrammatical reasoning. We describe an approach based on three formal components.Topologyis used to define basic geometric objects. Theory aboutspatial relationsfrom the domain of spatial databases is employed to define possible relationships between visual language elements.Description logic theoryfrom the AI community is used to combine topology and spatial relations. We prove the feasibility of our theory by describing three representative visual notations: entity-relationship diagrams, petri nets, and a pictorial language for concurrent logic programming.

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Authors
  1. Volker Haarslev
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, 3168, Australia

    Kim Marriott

  2. Lehr und Forschungseinrichtung für Programmierung und Softwaretechnik Institut für Informatik, Ludwig Maximillians Universität, Oettingenstrasse 67, Munich, 80538, Germany

    Bernd Meyer

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Haarslev, V. (1998). A Fully Formalized Theory for Describing Visual Notations. In: Marriott, K., Meyer, B. (eds) Visual Language Theory. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1676-6_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1676-6_9

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4612-7240-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4612-1676-6

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