A Diagrammatic Logic for Object-Oriented Visual Modeling

Generalized sketches is a graph-based specification format that borrows its main ideas from both categorical and first-order logic, and adapts them to software engineering needs. In the engineering jargon, it is a modeling language design pattern that combines mathematical rigor and appealing graphical appearance. The paper presents a careful motivation and justification of the applicability of generalized sketches for formalizing practical modeling notations. According to the needs in practical modeling we extend the sketch formalism by dependencies and developed new semantic notions based on the Instances-as-typed-structures idea. We show that this new framework fits in the general institutional pattern of logic management [14,17] and is well amenable to algebraic manipulations of categorical meta-logic