In recent years we have witnessed a growing interest in heterogeneous reasoning systems. A heterogeneous reasoning system incorporates representations from a number of different representation systems, in our case a sentential and a diagrammatic system. The advantage of heterogeneous systems is that they allow a reasoner to bridge the gaps among various formalisms and construct threads of proof which cross the boundaries of the systems of representation. In doing this, these heterogeneous systems allow the reasoner to take advantage of each component system's ability to express information in that component's area of expertise. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to propose a general theoretical framework, inspired by Barwise and Seligman's work in Information Theory [Barwise and Seligman, 1997], for the design of heterogeneous reasoning systems and to use this framework as the basis of an implementation of a First Order Logic and Euler/Venn reasoning system.
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