VGL Guide — Notation reference

One section per built-in notation: its node types, its edge types, and a complete worked example. Edge types constrain which connections make sense in the notation's domain, and most are inferred from the node types, so you rarely name one explicitly.

The editor's Examples… picker loads any of seventeen graphs straight into the text area, and most of the examples below are the same graph. Where the guide's version is the simpler one, the note under the example says so — the editor carries a fuller variant worth opening. Four of the editor's examples have no counterpart here at all: two further IBIS graphs (Complex System Architecture Decision, Software Project Planning), one showing folded groups (System Architecture with Folded Modules), and the BBS graph reproduced below. The two syntax examples in Concepts are guide-only.

In this section

• IBIS — Decision-making and argumentation.
• BBS — Benefit breakdown and analysis.
• Impact Mapping — A strategic planning graph showing goals, actors, impacts, and deliverables.
• Concept Map — Domain vocabulary as falsifiable propositions. The title is a Guiding
• Current Reality Tree (CRT) — Root cause analysis (Theory of Constraints), showing how causes lead to
• Future Reality Tree (FRT) — Solution validation (ToC), showing how proposed solutions lead to desired
• Transition Tree (TRT) — Step-by-step implementation planning (ToC). Shares CRT/FRT's node types but
• Prerequisite Tree (PRT) — Planning with necessary-condition thinking, starting from the objective and
• Evaporating Cloud (EC) — A conflict-resolution tool using necessary-condition logic, flowing
• Goal Tree — Strategic planning with Theory of Constraints necessity logic (H. William
• Attack-Defense Tree (ADTree) — Security modelling after Kordy et al. (2014), extending classical attack trees
• Causal Loop Diagram (CLD) — Systems analysis: what reinforces or balances what over time. Every element is a
• Decision Tree — Decision logic as questions, choices and outcomes.
• Timeline — Events across multiple tracks on a shared time axis, aligned by column.
• C4 — Software-architecture diagrams in Simon Brown's C4 model: people, software