Improving Semantic Transparency of Committee-Designed Languages through Crowd-sourcing

Committee-designed languages such as those of the OMG consortium are widely used in both industry and academia. These languages seem to be used increasingly by users with no technical background for the visualization, documentation and specification of workflows, data and software systems. However, according to several studies on these languages, the used visual notations do not seem to convey any particular semantics and the recognition of such notations is not perceptually immediate. This lack of semantic transparency increases the cognitive load to differentiate concepts from each other and slows down recognition and learning of the language constructs. This paper proposes a process, which leverages the crowd-sourcing to improve the semantic transparency of such languages. We believe that involving end-users in the design process of the languages visual notations should increase the expressiveness of these languages and then their acceptance for a wide range of novice-users.