Abstract
Diagrams are (meant to be) effective communication supports to convey information to stakeholders. Being communication supports, they have to be quickly and accurately understood. To enable immediateness, many disciplines such as cartography rely on keys, which categorise diagram symbols and bind them to their meaning. Software engineering extensively relies on visual languages such as UML to communicate amongst the many stakeholders involved in information systems’ life-cycle. Yet, keys are barely used in these diagrams, hindering (immediate) understanding and limiting it to language experts. We provide a disciplined approach to design effective keys, by adapting graphic semiology theory and cartographers’ know-how to software diagrams. We illustrate our method on a UML class diagram. Designing effective keys raises questions about the concerns and tasks to be addressed by the diagram, and even, reveals issues about the language itself.
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Notes
- 1.
According to the UML standard [11], association classes are associations with specific properties.
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Genon, N., Perrouin, G., Le Pallec, X., Heymans, P. (2016). Unlocking Visual Understanding: Towards Effective Keys for Diagrams. In: Comyn-Wattiau, I., Tanaka, K., Song, IY., Yamamoto, S., Saeki, M. (eds) Conceptual Modeling. ER 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9974. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46397-1_39
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