Visual logics help people: An evaluation of diagrammatic, textual and symbolic notations

Eisa Alharbi, John Howse, Gem Stapleton, Ali Hamie, Anestis Touloumis
2017 2017 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)  
Our aim is to provide empirical evidence that diagrammatic logics are more effective than symbolic and textual logics in allowing people to better understand information. Ontologies provide an important focus for such an empirical study: people need to understand the axioms of which ontologies comprise. A between-groups study compared six frequently-used axiom types using the (textual) Manchester OWL Syntax (MOS), (symbolic) description logic (DL) and concept diagrams. Concept diagrams yielded
more » ... ignificantly better task performance than DL for all six, and MOS for four, axiom types. MOS outperformed concept diagrams for just one axiom type and DL for only three axiom types. Thus diagrams could ensure ontologies are developed more robustly.
doi:10.1109/vlhcc.2017.8103475 dblp:conf/vl/AlharbiHSHT17 fatcat:5gxwxk5wqnhsxptvcop3pza5ay