Diagrams 2000 is dedicated to the memory of Jon Barwise. Diagrams 2000 was the ?rst event in a new interdisciplinary conference series on the Theory and Application of Diagrams. It was held at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, September 1-3, 2000. Driven by the pervasiveness of diagrams in human communication and by the increasing availability of graphical environments in computerized work, the study of diagrammatic notations is emerging as a research ?eld in its own right. This development has simultaneously taken place in several scienti?c disciplines, including, amongst others: cognitive science, arti?cial intelligence, and computer science. Consequently, a number of di?erent workshop series on this topic have been successfully organized during the last few years: Thinking with Diagrams, Theory of Visual Languages, Reasoning with Diagrammatic Representations, and Formalizing Reasoning with Visual and Diagrammatic Representations. Diagrams are simultaneously complex cognitive phenonema and sophis- cated computational artifacts. So, to be successful and relevant the study of diagrams must as a whole be interdisciplinary in nature. Thus, the workshop series mentioned above decided to merge into Diagrams 2000, as the single - terdisciplinary conference for this exciting new ?eld. It is intended that Diagrams 2000 should become the premier international conference series in this area and provide a forum with su?cient breadth of scope to encompass researchers from all academic areas who are studying the nature of diagrammatic representations and their use by humans and in machines.

The Boundary Theory of Phase Diagrams and Its Application -- Rules for Phase Diagram Construction with Phase Regions and Their Boundaries presents a novel theory of phase diagrams. Thoroughly revised on the basis of the Chinese edition and rigorously reviewed, this book inspects the general feature and structure of phase diagrams, and reveals that there exist actually two categories of boundaries. This innovative boundary theory has solved many difficulties in understanding phase diagrams, and also finds its application in constructing multi-component phase diagrams or in calculating high-pressure phase diagrams. Researchers and engineers as well as graduate students in the areas of chemistry, metallurgy and materials science will benefit from this book. Prof. Muyu Zhao was the recipient of the 1998 Prize for Progress in Science and Technology (for his work on the boundary theory of phase diagrams) awarded by the National Commission of Education, China, and many other prizes.

Finite functions (in particular, Boolean functions) play a fundamental role in computer science and discrete mathematics. This book describes representations of Boolean functions that have small size for many important functions and which allow efficient work with the represented functions. The representation size of important and selected functions is estimated, upper and lower bound techniques are studied, efficient algorithms for operations on these representations are presented, and the limits of those techniques are considered. This book is the first comprehensive description of theory and applications. Research areas like complexity theory, efficient algorithms, data structures, and discrete mathematics will benefit from the theory described in this book. The results described within have applications in verification, computer-aided design, model checking, and discrete mathematics. This is the only book to investigate the representation size of Boolean functions and efficient algorithms on these representations.

Diagrams 2000 is dedicated to the memory of Jon Barwise. Diagrams 2000 was the ?rst event in a new interdisciplinary conference series on the Theory and Application of Diagrams. It was held at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, September 1-3, 2000. Driven by the pervasiveness of diagrams in human communication and by the increasing availability of graphical environments in computerized work, the study of diagrammatic notations is emerging as a research ?eld in its own right. This development has simultaneously taken place in several scienti?c disciplines, including, amongst others: cognitive science, arti?cial intelligence, and computer science. Consequently, a number of di?erent workshop series on this topic have been successfully organized during the last few years: Thinking with Diagrams, Theory of Visual Languages, Reasoning with Diagrammatic Representations, and Formalizing Reasoning with Visual and Diagrammatic Representations. Diagrams are simultaneously complex cognitive phenonema and sophis- cated computational artifacts. So, to be successful and relevant the study of diagrams must as a whole be interdisciplinary in nature. Thus, the workshop series mentioned above decided to merge into Diagrams 2000, as the single - terdisciplinary conference for this exciting new ?eld. It is intended that Diagrams 2000 should become the premier international conference series in this area and provide a forum with su?cient breadth of scope to encompass researchers from all academic areas who are studying the nature of diagrammatic representations and their use by humans and in machines.

For someone with a hammer the whole world looks like a nail. Within the last 10-13 years Binar·y Decision Diagmms (BDDs) have become the state-of-the-art data structure in VLSI CAD for representation and ma nipulation of Boolean functions. Today, BDDs are widely used and in the meantime have also been integrated in commercial tools, especially in the area of verijication and synthesis. The interest in BDDs results from the fact that the data structure is generally accepted as providing a good compromise between conciseness of representation and efficiency of manipulation. With increasing number of applications, also in non CAD areas, classical methods to handle BDDs are being improved and new questions and problems evolve and have to be solved. The book should help the reader who is not familiar with BDDs (or DDs in general) to get a quick start. On the other hand it will discuss several new aspects of BDDs, e.g. with respect to minimization and implementation of a package. This will help people working with BDDs (in industry or academia) to keep informed about recent developments in this area.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Diagrams, Diagrams 2014, held in Melbourne, VIC, Australia in July/August 2014. The 15 revised full papers and 9 short papers presented together with 6 posters were carefully reviewed and selected from 40 submissions. The papers have been organized in the following topical sections: diagram layout, diagram notations, diagramming tools, diagrams in education, empirical studies and logic and diagrams.

Diagrams 2000 is dedicated to the memory of Jon Barwise. Diagrams 2000 was the ?rst event in a new interdisciplinary conference series on the Theory and Application of Diagrams. It was held at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, September 1-3, 2000. Driven by the pervasiveness of diagrams in human communication and by the increasing availability of graphical environments in computerized work, the study of diagrammatic notations is emerging as a research ?eld in its own right. This development has simultaneously taken place in several scienti?c disciplines, including, amongst others: cognitive science, arti?cial intelligence, and computer science. Consequently, a number of di?erent workshop series on this topic have been successfully organized during the last few years: Thinking with Diagrams, Theory of Visual Languages, Reasoning with Diagrammatic Representations, and Formalizing Reasoning with Visual and Diagrammatic Representations. Diagrams are simultaneously complex cognitive phenonema and sophis- cated computational artifacts. So, to be successful and relevant the study of diagrams must as a whole be interdisciplinary in nature. Thus, the workshop series mentioned above decided to merge into Diagrams 2000, as the single - terdisciplinary conference for this exciting new ?eld. It is intended that Diagrams 2000 should become the premier international conference series in this area and provide a forum with su?cient breadth of scope to encompass researchers from all academic areas who are studying the nature of diagrammatic representations and their use by humans and in machines.