A new language for the visualisation of logic and reasoning

Abstract

Many visual languages based on Euler diagrams have emerged for expressing relationships between sets. The expressive power of these languages varies, but the majority can only express statements involving unary relations and, sometimes, equality. We present a new visual language called Visual First Order Logic (VFOL) that was developed from work on constraint diagrams which are designed for software specification. VFOL is likely to be useful for software specification, because it is similar to constraint diagrams, and may also fit into a Z-like framework. We show that for every First Order Predicate Logic (FOPL) formula there exists a semantically equivalent VFOL diagram. The taranslation we give from FOPL to VFOL is natural and, as such, VFOL could also be used to teach FOPL, for example.