  Compact closed categories provide a foundational formalism for a variety of
important domains, including quantum computation. These categories have a
natural visualisation as a form of graphs. We present a formalism for
equational reasoning about such graphs and develop this into a generic proof
system with a fixed logical kernel for equational reasoning about compact
closed categories. Automating this reasoning process is motivated by the slow
and error prone nature of manual graph manipulation. A salient feature of our
system is that it provides a formal and declarative account of derived results
that can include `ellipses'-style notation. We illustrate the framework by
instantiating it for a graphical language of quantum computation and show how
this can be used to perform symbolic computation.
