Understanding understandability of conceptual models - what are we actually talking about? - Supplement

Abstract

Investigating and improving the quality of conceptual models has gained tremendous importance in recent years. In general, model understandability is regarded one of the most important model quality goals and criteria. A considerable amount of empirical studies, especially experiments, have been conducted in order to investigate factors in-fluencing the understandability of conceptual models. However, a thorough review and reconstruction of 42 experiments on conceptual model understandability shows that there is a variety of different understandings and conceptualizations of the term model understandability. As a consequence, this term remains ambiguous, research results on model understandability are hardly comparable and partly imprecise, which shows the necessity of clarification what the conceptual modeling community is actually talking about when the term model understandability is used. This contribution represents a supplement to the article „ Understanding understandability of conceptual models – What are we actually talking about?” published in the Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2012) which aimed at overcoming the above mentioned shortcoming by investigating and further clarifying the concept of model understandability. This supplement contains a complete overview of Table 1 (p. 69 in the original contribution) which could only be partly presented in the conference proceedings due to space limitations. Furthermore, an erratum concerning the overview in Table 2 (p. 71 in the original contribution) is presented.