Formalizing spider diagrams

Abstract

Geared to complement UML and the specification of large software systems by non-mathematicians, spider diagrams are a visual language that generalizes the popular and intuitive Venn diagrams and Euler circles. The language design emphasizes scalability and expressiveness while retaining intuitiveness. In this paper, we describe spider diagrams from a mathematical standpoint and show how their formal semantics can be made in terms of logical expressions. We also claim that all spider diagrams are self-consistent.