Logic and Visual Information (Center for the Study of Language and Information - Lecture Notes)

This book examines the logical foundations of visual information: information presented in the form of diagrams, graphs, charts, tables, and maps. The importance of visual information is clear from its frequent presence in everyday reasoning and communication, and also in computation. Chapters of the book develop the logics of familiar systems of diagrams such as Venn diagrams and Euler circles. Other chapters develop the logic of higraphs, Peirce diagrams, and a system having both diagrams and sentences among its well-formed representations. Syntax, semantics, rules of inference, and soundness and completeness results are provided for each of the systems. In addition to developing the logic of diagrams, key questions about the status of visual information are discussed, such as the relationship between language and visually-presented information.