On the Completeness and Expressiveness of Spider Diagram Systems

Spider diagram systems provide a visual language that extends the popular and intuitive Venn diagrams and Euler circles. Designed to complement object-oriented modelling notations in the specification of large software systems they can be used to reason diagrammatically about sets, their cardinalities and their relationships with other sets. A set of reasoning rules for a spider diagram system is shown to be sound and complete. We discuss the extension of this result to diagrammatically richer notations and also consider their expressiveness. Finally, we show that for a rich enough system we can diagrammatically express the negation of any diagram. Keywords Diagrammatic reasoning, visual formalisms.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: DIAGRAMS
• Authors: John Howse, Fernando Molina, John Taylor
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, DIAGRAMS 2000, Object-oriented Modelling Notations, Spider Diagram, Spider Diagram Systems