Marian Petre. Why looking isn't always seeing readership skills and graphical programming. Communication of the ACM, 38(6), June 1995.  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   ACM   TOC   Related Articles   Check

....component interconnection ensures type consistency, it may be useful to explain why a proposed connection is inappropriate, to clarify misconceptions about component functionality. The above systems appear to o er no support for explaining typed interconnection constraints. Marian Petre [43] reported some research focusing on understanding how textual and visual representations for software di er in e ectiveness. Novice and experts appear to see di erently and they have di erent notational needs. Pure functional languages and their relatives, such as LISP and SML, often have simple ....

Marian Petre. Why looking isn't always seeing readership skills and graphical programming. Communication of the ACM, 38(6), June 1995.

....include in a program to clarify its meaning, such as comments in traditional languages. Changing an instance of secondary notation, such as a textual comment, does not change a program s behavior. Petre argues that secondary notation is crucial to the comprehensibility of graphical notations [Petre 1995]. The use of secondary notations allows clarifications and emphases of important information such as structure and relationships. Four such devices are measured by SN1 and SN2: optional naming, layout devices with no semantic impact, textual annotations and comments, and static graphical ....

Marian Petre, "Why Looking Isn't Always Seeing: Readership Skills and Graphical Programming," Communications of the ACM 38(6), 33-44, June 1995.

....discovered, and an interpretation is determined relative to some model of the domain. The three stage model is not detailed enough for meaningful comparison of recognition techniques. It cannot be used to describe the more powerful interpretive techniques human readers use as described by Petre [Pet95]. She discusses this in the area of electric circuit diagram recognition, where what she calls the secondary structure , such as the layout rules of the diagram, is very important to human readers. In her example of an electric circuit diagram, electrical components are typically grouped together ....

....resistors and op amp would be grouped together, creating the secondary structure of the diagram. Petre noted, in her research, that human readers familiar with the diagrammatic notation tended to gravitate instantly toward the secondary structure to provide feedback in determining interpretation [Pet95]. Many diagram recognition strategies also perform some incorporation into structural groupings [Fah95] MMH88] or use other information (for example probabilities) to determine a global interpretation after their local constraint processing tasks are completed [HK90] The model of diagram ....

Marian Petre, "Why Looking isn't Always Seeing: Readership Skills and Graphical Programming", Communications of the ACM, Vol. 38, No. 6, June, 1995. pp. 33 - 44.

....important to have mechanisms that allow us to introduce secondary notation in the diagrams, making it easier to comprehend the ideas behind them. Secondary notation is extra notation that does not change the formal meaning but helps the reader to locate relevant information in the diagrams (see [29]) We now introduce an element that will improve the language in this direction: the graphical copy . It is a syntactic facility that allows us to have a copy of a set or an element in any place of the diagram. It consists in an unlabeled box or a circle, joined to the original set or element ....

....to follow when designing a visual declarative language, although (like our language) it lacks a formal semantics definition directly based on the visual syntax. It would be also interesting to explore the use of a 3D syntax but we have yet to balance its advantages against known disadvantages (see [29, 14]) Our visual language is strongly rooted in a set theoretical approach to predicates. And we believe this set based syntax helps emphasize some semantic and pragmatic features of logical statements. Other languages like VLP, VPP or GrafOLog are mainly based on visual symbolic representations of ....

Marian Petre. Why Looking Isn't Always Seeing: Readership Skills and Graphical Programming. Communications of the ACM, 38(6), June 1995.

....validation task with sophisticated users not familiar with the particular graphical language. Both user groups showed semantic error rates between 25 and 70 for the separately scored areas of entities, attributes, and relations. Relations were particularly troublesome to both analysts and users. Marian (1995) compares diagrams with textual representations of nested conditional structures (which can be compared to data modeling in the complexity of the paths through the system) He finds that the intrinsic difficulty of the graphics mode was the strongest effect observed (p.35) We therefore ....

Marian, P. (1995). Why looking isn't always seeing: Readership skills and graphical programming. Communications of the ACM, 38(6):33--42.

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