Picking Knots from Trees - The Syntactic Structure of Celtic Knotwork
Frank Drewes, Renate Klempien-Hinrichs · 2000
. Interlacing knotwork forms a signicant part of celtic art. From the perspective of computer science, it is a visual language following mathematically precise rules of construction. In this paper, we study the syntactic generation of celtic knots using collage grammars. Several syntactic regulation mechanisms are employed in order to ensure that only consistent designs are generated. 1 Introduction A typical characteristic of visual languages is that the diagrams in such a language are related by a common structure and layout. In other words, the language is dened by a set of syntactic visual rules yielding the acceptable pictures. Formal picture-generating methods help to understand the structure of the languages in question, to classify them, and to generate them automatically by means of computer programs. Fig. 1. A celtic knot Artists from many cultures have been using visual rules since ancient times in order to design diagrams of various sorts. Celtic diagrams, and in ...