Abstract
Although logic is general enough to describe anything that can be implemented on a digital computer, the unreadability of predicate calculus makes it unpopular as a design language. Instead, many graphic notations have been developed, each for a narrow range of purposes. Conceptual graphs are a graphic system of logic that is as general as predicate calculus, but they are as readable as the special-purpose diagrams. In fact, many popular diagrams can be viewed as special cases of conceptual graphs: type hierarchies, entity-relationship diagrams, parse trees, dataflow diagrams, flow charts, state-transition diagrams, and Petri nets. This paper shows how such diagrams can be translated to conceptual graphs and thence into other systems of logic, such as the Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF).
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© 1993 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Sowa, J.F. (1993). Relating diagrams to logic. In: Mineau, G.W., Moulin, B., Sowa, J.F. (eds) Conceptual Graphs for Knowledge Representation. ICCS 1993. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 699. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-56979-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-56979-0_1
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