Automatic design of graphical presentations
Automatic design of graphical presentations
Communications of the ACM
External cognition: how do graphical representations work?
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Using spatial logic to describe visual languages
Artificial Intelligence Review - Special issue on integration of natural language and vision processing: recent advances
Constraint-preserving representations
Logic, language and computation, vol. 2
Aligning Logical and Psychological Perspectives on Diagrammatic Reasoning
Artificial Intelligence Review
Formal semantics of visual languages using spatial reasoning
VL '95 Proceedings of the 11th International IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages
On the Definition of Visual Languages and Their Editors
DIAGRAMS '02 Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Diagrammatic Representation and Inference
CT '01 Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Cognitive Technology: Instruments of Mind
Visual qualities of the Unified Modeling Language: Deficiencies and Improvements
VLHCC '07 Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing
Twelve years of diagrams research
Journal of Visual Languages and Computing
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This paper examines diagrams which exploit qualitative spatial relations (QSRs) for representation. Our point of departure is the theory that such diagram systems are most effective when their formal properties match those of the domains that they represent (e.g. [1, 2, 3]). We argue that this is true in certain cases (e.g. when a user is constructing diagrammatic representations of a certain kind) but that formal properties cannot be studied in isolation from an account of the cognitive capacities of diagram users to detect and categorize diagram objects and relations. We discuss a cognitively salient repertoire of elements in qualitative visual languages, which is different from the set of primitives in mathematical topology, and explore how this repertoire affects the expressivity of the languages in terms of their vocabulary and the possible spatial relations between diagram elements. We then give a detailed analysis of the formal properties of relations between the diagram elements. It is shown that the analysis can be exploited systematically for the purposes of designing a diagram system and analysing expressivity. We demonstrate this methodology with reference to several domains, e.g. diagrams for file systems and set theory (see e.g. [4]).