Semantic Interpretation and Feedback for Digital Sketching Environments

Free-hand drawing of diagrams or sketches is a natural form of expression in a variety of learning settings. It is easily supported by tablets or tablet PCs. Often such sketches are the basis of reasoning processes, also in collaborative scenarios. Sketches can indicate misconceptions. Therefore it is desirable to support a semantic interpretation of sketches integrated with other parts of a learning environment or with an ITS. Our solution introduces a multi-agent architecture based on the blackboard paradigm. Inspired by the Cog Sketch system, it supports the introduction of user-defined "glyphs" as external representations of concepts, it provides a set of basic geometrical/topological primitives and allows for the addition of more domain-specific semantic relations.