![](bg4.png)
designer creates a diagram and/or modifies it using
design actions, the hyper-graph is automatically
generated.
For each labelled design component in the form of a
polygon one component hyper-edge is created.
Figure 3: The hyper-graph for the drawing in Fig. 2.
Semantic information about this component de-
scribing it as a room is automatically completed by a
hyper-edge label describing a type of this room.
When the designer divides a component into parts,
the hyper-graph composed of component and rela-
tional hyper-edges representing the arrangement of
these parts is nested in the component hyper-edge
representing the divided component. For each line
shared by polygons in the diagram one relational
hyper-edge connecting nodes representing corre-
sponding sides of the polygons is generated. Seman-
tic information about this relation depends on the
line styles and determines the type of the relational
hyper-edge label. In the considered example, lines
with door symbol on them represent the accessibility
relation among components, while continuous lines
shared by polygons denote the adjacency relations
between them.
During the conceptual visual design process
aided by computer diagrams created by the designer
and transformed to appropriate hyper-graphs and
then translated to sentences of the first-order logic.
In this process a problem-oriented relational struc-
ture, which assigns elements of hyper-graphs to enti-
ties of the specified first-order logic alphabet is used.
The design domain of this structure includes: a set of
component hyper-edges, and a set of hyper-graph
nodes. Relations between design components pre-
sented in the diagram are specified between frag-
ments of these components, which correspond to
hyper-graph nodes. The interpretation of each rela-
tion is the hyper-edge relation of the hyper-graph
such that there is a relational hyper-edge coming
from a sequence of nodes of at least one component
hyper-edge and coming into a sequence of nodes of
other component hyper-edges.
4 CONCLUSIONS
This paper is an attempt to present a formal coherent
framework for computer aided conceptual visual
design aided by computer. Important features of this
framework are as follows:
• a distinction between different kinds of knowl-
edge determined by designer’s requirements,
visual sites, actions, data structures and logical
languages,
• a formal description of divergent and conver-
gent categories of thinking,
• a formal description of the fundamentals of vis-
ual design necessary to devise CAD-systems
and new computer cognitive tools.
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