School of Computing

A New Language for the Visualization of Logic and reasoning

Gem Stapleton, Simon Thompson, Andrew Fish, John Howse, and John Taylor

In Philip Cox and Trevor Smedley, editors, Proceedings of the 2005 International Workshop on Visual Languages and Computing, pages 287-292, September 2005 Published as a part of the Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Distributed Multimedia Systems.

Abstract

Many visual languages based on Euler diagrams have emerged for expressing relationships between sets. The expressive power of these languages varies, but the majority can only express statements involving unary relations and, sometimes, equality. We present a new visual language called Visual First Order Logic (VFOL) that was developed from work on constraint diagrams which are designed for software specification. VFOL is likely to be useful for software specification, because it is similar to constraint diagrams, and may also fit into a Z-like framework. We show that for every First Order Predicate Logic (FOPL) formula there exists a semantically equivalent VFOL diagram. The translation we give from FOPL to VFOL is natural and, as such, VFOL could also be used to teach FOPL, for example.

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Bibtex Record

@inproceedings{2242,
author = {Gem Stapleton and Simon Thompson and Andrew Fish and John Howse and John Taylor},
title = {{A New Language for the Visualization of Logic and reasoning}},
month = {September},
year = {2005},
pages = {287-292},
keywords = {},
note = {Published as a part of the Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Distributed Multimedia Systems.},
doi = {},
url = {http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/pubs/2005/2242},
    publication_type = {inproceedings},
    submission_id = {21046_1126276502},
    ISBN = {1-891706-17-9},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2005 International Workshop on Visual Languages and Computing },
    editor = {Philip Cox and Trevor Smedley},
    refereed = {Yes},
}

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