Ten years of cognitive dimensions in visual languages and computing Guest Editor's introduction to special issue

摘要

This paper marks the tenth anniversary of the 1996 publication, in the Journal of Visual Languages and Computing, of Thomas Green and Marian Petre's classic paper Usability analysis of visual programming environments: a 'cognitive dimensions' framework. In the ten years since then, many visual language researchers have used this paper as their primary reference with regard to usability questions, and it has spawned a large secondary literature, with over 50 publications devoted to the further development of the cognitive dimensions (CDs) framework. The papers in this special issue represent the current state of the art in the field. At the time of writing, the Green and Petre paper is the most-cited original research publication that has appeared in this journal (another highly cited paper is the taxonomic review in [2]). This issue builds on the subsequent interest in usability of visual languages, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which the framework is becoming relevant in professional design, in characterisation of language usability, and in extension of visual languages approaches to other recent technology developments.