Abstract
This paper is the first to establish the impact of colour on users’ ability to interpret the informational content of concept diagrams, a logic designed for ontology engineering. Motivation comes from results for Euler diagrams, which form a fragment of concept diagrams: manipulating curve colours affects user performance. In particular, using distinct curve colours yields significant performance benefits in Euler diagrams. Naturally, one would expect to obtain similar empirical results for concept diagrams, since colour is a graphical feature to which we are perceptually sensitive. Thus, this paper sets out to test this expectation by conducting a crowdsourced empirical study involving 261 participants. Our study suggests that manipulating curve colours no longer yields significant performance differences in this syntactically richer logic. Consequently, when using colour to visually group syntactic elements with common semantic properties, we ask how different do the elements’ shapes need to be in order for there to be significant performance benefits arising from using colours?
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Notes
- 1.
Concept diagrams were developed specifically for ontology engineering. Other visual ‘ontology’ notations include SOVA [15], which is based on node-link diagrams and, thus, is syntactically very different from concept diagrams.
- 2.
We acknowledge the blurring between syntax and semantics here; strictly speaking, A and B are monadic predicates and p is a dyadic predicate.
- 3.
Whilst [2] reports on OWL and DL, their study also included a third treatment: concept diagrams. None of the diagrams used in our studies were syntactically identical to Alharbi et al.’s diagrams; we adjusted the layouts and represented Some statements differently. Our training material was not the same as that provided by Alharbi et al., in part since we followed a crowdsourced approach.
- 4.
The impact of the three colourblind participants on the data collected was not significant.
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Acknowledgements
This research was partially funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant (RPG- 2016–082) for the project entitled Accessible Reasoning with Diagrams. Thanks to Eisa Alharbi for supplying experimental materials, associated with [2], on which some of our materials were based.
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McGrath, S. et al. (2022). Evaluating Colour in Concept Diagrams. In: Giardino, V., Linker, S., Burns, R., Bellucci, F., Boucheix, JM., Viana, P. (eds) Diagrammatic Representation and Inference. Diagrams 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13462. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15146-0_14
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