I am happy to announce that we published a new paper in Software and Systems Modeling Journal entitled “Conceptualization, measurement, and application of semantic transparency in visual notations”.
Diagrams have an essential role in human interactions with complex systems. To assure effective communications, they need to be comprehensible, which depends also on the applied visual languages or notations. Semantic transparency is one of the elementary principles that influence notations’ cognitive effectiveness. However, the principle is criticized for not being well defined and challenges arise in the evaluations and applications of the principle. Accordingly, our research’s objectives were to answer how semantic transparency is defined, operationalized, and evaluated in present notations as well as applied in the design of new notations in ICT and related areas.
To meet these objectives, we performed a systematic literature review with 94 studies passing the selection process criteria. The results reject one of the three aspects, which define semantic transparency (ST), namely “ST is achieved with the use of icons.” Besides, taxonomies of related concepts and research methods, evaluation metrics, and other findings from this study can help to conduct verifiable ST-related experiments and applications, consequently improving the visual vocabularies of notations and effectiveness of the resulting diagrams.
Take a look at the highlight of the paper below. As a part of Springer Nature Content Sharing Initiative, we are also glad to be able to share a full text (view-only) version of our paper https://rdcu.be/ckWmY.
Cite this article as:
Kuhar, S., Polančič, G. Conceptualization, measurement, and application of semantic transparency in visual notations. Softw Syst Model (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-021-00888-9.
Gregor Polančič 
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