Meta Tool Support for a GUI for Conceptual Structures

Previous conceptual structure editors have focussed on providing specialised drawing tools. Although the drawing operations in these tools produce the appropriate notation, they can not directly support the language of conceptual structures. Authors are required to consider both the logistics of creating neat drawings, as well as their meaning. Logicians investigating new proof techniques are hampered when experimenting with operations on a representation that must be explicitly drawn. Researchers in various domains who want to produce customised interfaces with varying operational vocabularies are burdened by the task of coercing a drawing metaphor to include operational aspects. This work presents an approach to the conceptual structure editor that supports the underlying language directly. All drawing operations are direct implementations of theoretical operations. Direct manipulation of graphs through the interface conform to theory entailment. The architecture supports direct manipulation interfaces de ned in terms of the operations of the theory at several levels: (i) the author who declaratively adds knowledge to the system using the standard toolkit and inference operations; (ii) the logician who wishes to graphically experiment with new inference operations and proof techniques, and (iii) the application developer who wishes to customise the interface by limiting or extending access to a standard toolkit. Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor Dr Peter W. Eklund for his enthusiasm throughout this year. His active support, well-placed guidance, and willingness to allow me to exercise my intellectual curiosity has been the key to this work. To all my friends and family who have believed in and supported this year's work either through direct advice, support, or simply through the provision of a relaxing respite in a di cult year | thankyou. i