CS846 Paper Review Form - Winter 2012 Reviewer: Kaheer Suleman Paper Title: The Physics of Notations: Toward a Scientific Basis for Constructing Visual Notations in Software Engineering Author(s): 1) Is the paper technically correct? [X] Yes [ ] Mostly (minor flaws, but mostly solid) [ ] No 2) Originality [ ] Very good (very novel, trailblazing work) [X] Good [ ] Marginal (very incremental) [ ] Poor (little or nothing that is new) 3) Technical Depth [ ] Very good (comparable to best conference papers) [X] Good (comparable to typical conference papers) [ ] Marginal depth [ ] Little or no depth 4) Impact/Significance [ ] Very significant [X] Significant [ ] Marginal significance. [ ] Little or no significance. 5) Presentation [X] Very well written [ ] Generally well written [ ] Readable [ ] Needs considerable work [ ] Unacceptably bad 6) Overall Rating [X] Strong accept (award quality) [ ] Accept (high quality - would argue for acceptance) [ ] Weak Accept (borderline, but lean towards acceptance) [ ] Weak Reject (not sure why this paper was published) 7) Summary of the paper's main contribution and rationale for your recommendation. (1-2 paragraphs) The authors of the paper propose a set of principles and guidelines for designing and evaluating visual notation. The authors argue that that visual syntax has been ignored by designers. Instead , designers have focused on the semantics of the notation. The authors suggest that visual syntax has a great affect on the effectiveness of a diagram. The paper describes a theory for communication via graphical components. They define a set of primitives called visual variables. They define graphical symbols to be combinations of assignments of these variables. The paper then moves on to describe a set of principles that if followed would increase the effectiveness of the graphical model The first principle is that there should be a one to one relationship between the symbols and the concepts. If there are not, it can lead to ambiguity in decoding of the model. Secondly, each symbol must be clearly separable from the others. They define the distance between two symbols as the number of different variable assignments and the difference between them. Along with being able to discriminate between symbols, the paper suggests that a user should be able to determine the meaning of the symbol by looking at it. That is , its appearance should match the semantic meaning. Also, users should be able to integrate many diagrams easily. The paper suggests that in many visual notation sets , the full range of available symbols are not used. For example, colour is often ignored even though it is often very effective. Finally, different notation should be used for different users. One example , which was provided in the paper, was a different notation for experts versus novice users. Novice users would require a much simpler notation set than an expert as well as requiring more annotations. Overall the paper was well written and easy to read. The ideas presented in the paper were very interesting and although they were borrowed from various fields, I think their application to software engineering is both original and valuable. The paper also opens the door for further work in order to gain empirical evidence of the effectiveness of the principles presented. 8) List 1-3 strengths of the paper. (1-2 sentences each, identified as S1, S2, S3.) S1: The authors clearly stated what they believed was the impact of the work in the field of software engineering and elsewhere S2: Diagrams were used in an effective manner to complement their explanations. S3: The important terms in the paper were highlighted making it easier to identify them. I found 9) List 1-3 weaknesses of the paper (1-2 sentences each, identified as W1, W2, W3.) W1: The paper did not provide any empirical evidence on the principles in an software engineering setting. The principles have been shown to be effective in other fields and the paper does provide references to this work. W2: I found the recap section in the conclusion to be unnecessarily verbose. There was a subsection in the conclusion that just reiterated each of the sections in the paper. In my opinion the recap should have been condensed into a single small paragraph while leaving the rest of the conclusion to discuss impact.