Tutorial 1: Formal Approaches to Visual Language Specification and Understanding

Abstract

Two of the most fundamental questions in visual language research are how to specify a visual language and how to recognize and understand diagrams in a particular visual language. In this tutorial we survey the many formalisms which have been suggested over the last three decades for visual language specification, discuss computational approaches to diagram understanding based on these formalisms and indicate possible applications. We shall also review recent directions in visual language theory, notably efforts to develop an analogue of the Chomsky hierarchy for visual languages, the specification of diagrammatic reasoning, and cognitive models of visual language understanding.