It is commonly accepted that non-logicians have difficulty in expressing themselves in first order logic. Part of the visual language community is concerned with providing visual notations which use visual cues ("declarative diagrams") to make the structuring of logical expressions more intuitive. One of the more successful metaphors used in such diagrammatic languages is that of set inclusion, making use of the graphical intuitions which most of us are taught at school. Existing declarative diagrammatic languages do not make full use of such set-based intuitions. We present a more uniform use of sets which allow simple but highly expressive diagrams to be constructed from a small number of primitive components. These diagrams provide an alternative notation for a computational logic and, as we show in this paper, are the basis of a visual logic programming language. The first implementation of this language and a heterogeneous logic programming environment are also presented in this p...

By marrying traditional methods for computer programming with an artistic temperament, we give birth to a new phenomenon: the aesthetic program. Our work builds on visual approaches in programming as well as modeling for software, where I envision a gradual evolution from program to model. The need for the aesthetic model is strengthened with the importance of personalized, individually-tailored, models. I, and my students, have formulated the rube Project methodology around the use of 3D web-based virtual world construction of models. Initial results suggest that these models are artistic, while containing sufficient symbolism and concise metaphoric mapping as to be executable on a computer.

Among the different sorts of challenges for the modeling and simulation community, two types of challenges face us: challenges that optimize space and time for the computer, and challenges that improve the human interface to the modeling and simulation process itself. While of these types of challenges are important for the future health of simulation, we present a grand challenge of the latter variety, based on an area termed integrative multimodeling. The purpose of integrative multimodeling is to provide a human-computer interaction environment that allows components of different model types to be linked to one another—most notably dynamic models used in simulation to geometry models for the phenomena being modeled. We specify current modeling practices in simulation and proceed to justify a need for the challenge. We then follow this with two areas: aesthetic computing and the RUBE software framework, which supports customized “notations” for dynamic models constructed using the eXtensible Markup Language (XML).

The deep semantics of a scheme is defined as a set of programs derivable from the scheme. A uniform way of representing deep semantics of schemes is introduced based on the usage of a program synthesizer. An implementation of structural synthesis of programs in the NUT system and visual tools built on top of it are described. A visual compositional programming technique based on these tools is demonstrated on a number of examples. 1. Department of Teleinformatics, Royal Institute of Technology, Kista, Sweden 2 1. Introduction A visual programming tool is described in this paper which is intended for compositional programming. It can be, first of all, used for developing problem-oriented visual languages in engineering domains. Visual compositional programming can be considered as an extension of visual object-oriented programming thoroughly discussed in [1]. The extension lies in different encapsulation of objects and different usage of classes which is inherent to the NUT system [...

This paper examines the usage and effects of customized

This article presents the animated visual 3D programming language SAM (Solid Agents in Motion) for parallel systems specification and animation. A SAM program is a set of interacting agents synchronously exchanging messages. The agent's behavior is specified by means of production rules with a condition and a sequence of actions each. Actions are linearly ordered and execute when matching a rule. In SAM, main syntactic objects like agents, rules, and messages are 3D. These objects can have an abstract and a concrete, solid 3D presentation. While the abstract representation is for programming and debugging, the concrete representation is for animated 3D enduser presentations. After outlining the concepts of SAM, this article gives two programming examples of 3D micro worlds and an overview of the programming environment.

In previous work we presented a diagrammatic syntax for logic programming which clearly `resembles' the semantics of predicates as relations, i.e. sets of tuples in the Universe of Discourse. This paper shows diagrams as an alternative formal notation for pure logic programming which not only emphasizes some structural features of logical statements, but could also be useful to conduct visual inferences and to communicate them. This paper describes the current state of our research on a visual inference system for answering visually posed queries by means of diagram transformations. Although the transformations are shown by example we point to their correctness and formal character.

We believe that the pragmatics and understanding of formal logic and also declarative programming languages are sensible to the type of syntax used. Our goal is to study how to apply the new developments in the #eld of diagrammatic reasoning to declarative programming languages. In this paper we summarize the work done up to now in a visual logic language developped at the IIIA. We also attempt a complete formalization of its syntax, semantics and inference system. We claim that our visual syntax and operational semantics have a higher degree of homomorphism with respect to the mathematical semantics of the language than in conventional textual languages. Finally,we study two interesting new features: the abilityofintuitively keeping track of the proof and the possibility to represent several solutions to the query, both using a single diagram.

In VL'96 we presented a visual declarative programming language based on two main graphical constructs: directed acyclic graphs representing predicate application and graphical set inclusion representing logical implication. We showed that with these simple visual constructs we can cover most of the representational demands of computational logic allowing a blend of functional and relational styles of programming. In this paper we explore the advantages of using directly our visual syntax for solving queries, by giving a way to visually ask questions about a visual program by means of query diagrams, and by defining visual inferences which operate on those diagrams. The result is an operational semantics for declarative programming which is intended to be visual, intuitive and formal. Visual because the inference rules display graphically the transformation of query diagrams into answer diagrams. Intuitive because it is intimately linked with the visual syntax of the declarative langua...

Construction of immersive virtual environments usually takes place outside the virtual environment in configuration files or application code. The system presented in this paper allows interaction with and behaviours of objects to be defined whilst immersed within the system by manipulating a dataflow representation of the dialogue occuring between the input devices and virtual objects. A concrete example is presented that illustrates the flexibility and customization opportunities that this approach provides.