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Published in:
2016 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
On Comments in Visual Languages
Authors : Christoph Daniel Schulze, Christina Plöger, Reinhard von Hanxleden
Published in: Diagrammatic Representation and Inference
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
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Abstract
Visual languages based on node-link diagrams can be used to develop software and usually offer the possibility to write explanatory comments. Which node a comment refers to is usually not made explicit, but is implicitly clear to readers through placement and content. While automatic layout algorithms can make working with diagrams more productive, they tend to destroy such implicit clues because they are not aware of them and thus do not preserve the spatial relationship between diagram elements. Implicit clues thus need to be inferred and made explicit to be taken into account by layout algorithms. In this paper, we improve upon a previous paper on the subject [9], introducing further heuristics that aim to describe relations between comments and nodes. These heuristics mainly help to reduce the number of attachments of comments that should not be attached to anything. We also derive propositions on how developers of visual languages should integrate comments.