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Visual Representation of Fuzzy Categories based on Extended Geometric Objects
A need to describe and represent categories arises in many practical situations that require collaboration between experts expressing different views. Category can be seen as a "mental representation of a class of instances" that is encoded and used afterwards as a product of decoding, synthesizing and descriptive generalized transformations in practice. To obtain the ultimate representation form, rather laborious multi-stage activity has to be carried out, and each expert has to utilize all available domain-specific information at his (her) disposal. Most of expressive forms provide not only a convenient tool for easy and confident personal perception, a medium of sharing available qualitative and quantitative data that is imprecise (fuzzy) by nature, but also a means of presenting clear knowledge frames, individual assumptions and facts, which may not be converted straight away to some formal language constructs. As a matter of fact, we consider one particular aspect of categories representation, to which one can arrive through interpretation, verbalization and certain forms of visualization of abstract mental images ('snapshots') and broad notions, i.e. concepts. The complexity of direct explanation of categorization process is related not only to mechanism of categories storage per se, but also to acknowledgement of fuzzy nature of such categories. In the paper, we’ll deliberately narrow down the topic touching upon just one important aspect of categories (classes) usage, which is associated with handy graphical representation that allows to consider their inherent fuzziness.