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On the Semantic Transparency of Visual Notations: Experiments with UML

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SDL 2015: Model-Driven Engineering for Smart Cities (SDL 2015)

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Abstract

Graphical notations designed by committees in the context of standardization bodies, like Object Management Group (OMG), are widely used in the industry and academia. Naive users of these notations have limited background on visualization, documentation and specification of workflows, data or software systems. Several studies have pointed out the fact that these notations do not convey any particular semantics and their understanding is not perceptually immediate. As reported in these studies, this lack of semantic transparency increases the cognitive load to differentiate between concepts, slows down the learning and comprehension of the language constructs. This paper reports on a set of experiments that confirm the lack of semantic transparency of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as designed by OMG and compares this standard to alternative solutions where naive users are involved in the design of the notations to speed-up the learning of these languages to new users.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the internationalization fund of ETS Montreal and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Engineering and Computer Sciences, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Amine El Kouhen & Ferhat Khendek

  2. Department of Software and IT Engineering, École de Technologie Supérieure, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Abdelouahed Gherbi

  3. University of Lille, CRISTAL CNRS UMR 9189, Cite Scientifique - Batiment M3, Villeneuve d’ascq, France

    Cédric Dumoulin

Authors
  1. Amine El Kouhen
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  2. Abdelouahed Gherbi
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  3. Cédric Dumoulin
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  4. Ferhat Khendek
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Amine El Kouhen .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Joachim Fischer

  2. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Markus Scheidgen

  3. Fraunhofer FOKUS, Berlin, Germany

    Ina Schieferdecker

  4. Telecommunications Software Engineering, Windermere, United Kingdom

    Rick Reed

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El Kouhen, A., Gherbi, A., Dumoulin, C., Khendek, F. (2015). On the Semantic Transparency of Visual Notations: Experiments with UML. In: Fischer, J., Scheidgen, M., Schieferdecker, I., Reed, R. (eds) SDL 2015: Model-Driven Engineering for Smart Cities. SDL 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9369. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24912-4_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24912-4_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-24911-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-24912-4

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