PEIRCE is a project aiming to build a state-of-the-art, industrial strength conceptual graphs workbench. PEIRCE is integrating the conceptual graphs development efforts that are taking place around the world. There are already over 40 researchers from over 8 countries involved in the project. This paper describes the PEIRCE project and the structure for managing the distributed development of PEIRCE. PEIRCE will provide a robust, portable, freely available conceptual graphs workbench that will fast track new techniques into the community; facilitate comparison of competing techniques; help researchers cooperate in development; and speed application development.
The PEIRCE project is named after the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce who in 1896 developed the logic Existential Graphs [11]. Peirce described existential graphs as "the logic of the future". It is nearly a century since Peirce made that statement, and only now is his logic poised to become a reality...