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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Christopher Holt
Visual language design is driven by interaction between syntax and semantics: changing the way a concept is represented affects the ease with which it can be understood and related to other concepts. The use of lines, boxes, and icons to augment text affects intuitions about operations and properties. This paper is concerned with characterising syntax by developing a ""natural"" algebra that tries to reflect it. The nature of boxes gives rise to two kinds of operations, enclosure and adjointness, that can be related to form a ring, which can be embedded in a vector space. Lines connecting boxes can represent an operation that is related to adjointness, but which is more general in arity and the orientation of the edges that can be linked. The decoration of lines and boxes with emblems provides a facility for representing higher-order operations.
Author(s): Holt CM
Publication type: Report
Publication status: Published
Series Title: Department of Computing Science Technical Report Series
Year: 1994
Pages: 14
Print publication date: 01/06/1994
Source Publication Date: June 1994
Report Number: 483
Institution: Department of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Place Published: Newcastle upon Tyne
URL: http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publications/trs/papers/483.pdf
