TY - JOUR
T1 - Comprehension of diagram syntax
T2 - an empirical study of entity relationship notations
AU - Purchase, Helen C.
AU - Welland, Ray
AU - McGill, Matthew
AU - Colpoys, Linda
N1 - Funding Information:
We are grateful to the students of the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at the University of Queensland who willingly took part in the experiment, the Australian Research Council, which funded this research, and the anonymous reviewers who commented on an earlier draft of this paper. Ethical clearance for this study was granted by The University of Queensland, 2001.
PY - 2004/8
Y1 - 2004/8
N2 - Well-defined symbolic notations are essential for communication between teams of people working on any application. For large software implementations, UML is commonly used; for databases, entity relationship (ER) diagrams are useful. However, the form of notation used in texts, papers, and documentation and learning materials is often different, and tends to reflect the personal preference of the author or publisher. The choice between semantically equivalent notations does not appear to be based on any consideration of the ease with which human readers could understand the notation. This paper addresses this notation comprehension issue by proposing an experimental methodology for determining which of two complete notations is easier to comprehend. The methodology also allows individual notational variants to be targeted. This methodology has been applied to two types of ER notations: our experiment required subjects to indicate whether a supplied textual specification of objects and relationships matched each of a set of Chen (Chen, ACM Trans. Database Systems 1 (1976) 9) and SSADM (Weaver, Practical SSADM Version 4-A Complete Tutorial Guide, Pitman, London, 1993) ER diagrams. The results reveal both better performance and higher preference for the more concise overall notation, with partial results with respect to individual variants within the notations.
AB - Well-defined symbolic notations are essential for communication between teams of people working on any application. For large software implementations, UML is commonly used; for databases, entity relationship (ER) diagrams are useful. However, the form of notation used in texts, papers, and documentation and learning materials is often different, and tends to reflect the personal preference of the author or publisher. The choice between semantically equivalent notations does not appear to be based on any consideration of the ease with which human readers could understand the notation. This paper addresses this notation comprehension issue by proposing an experimental methodology for determining which of two complete notations is easier to comprehend. The methodology also allows individual notational variants to be targeted. This methodology has been applied to two types of ER notations: our experiment required subjects to indicate whether a supplied textual specification of objects and relationships matched each of a set of Chen (Chen, ACM Trans. Database Systems 1 (1976) 9) and SSADM (Weaver, Practical SSADM Version 4-A Complete Tutorial Guide, Pitman, London, 1993) ER diagrams. The results reveal both better performance and higher preference for the more concise overall notation, with partial results with respect to individual variants within the notations.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=3042823149&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2004.01.003
DO - 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2004.01.003
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:3042823149
SN - 1071-5819
VL - 61
SP - 187
EP - 203
JO - International Journal of Human Computer Studies
JF - International Journal of Human Computer Studies
IS - 2 SPEC. ISS.
ER -