Diagrammatic spreadsheet

The diagramatic spreadsheet concept to develop a fully interactive animated diagrammatic system in which the transformation and animation of the diagram is interactively avaible to the user in a click-and-drag mode, and the description of what elements can move, and in what way (according to the required constraints between their components) can be also easily and interactively defined by the user. A constraint is used here like a formula in a spreadsheet, which is employed to automatically recompute the value of a cell whenever any other cells bound to it by the constraint undergo change. The graphical elements of the diagram play the role of spreadsheet cells, and their various attributes constitute the cell contents. The system may be used by human users for interactive exploration of diagrammatic representation and reasoning problems, or as a front-end to a more automatic diagrammatic inference system. In the paper, an overview of this concept and general construction principles of the system are described.