Kepler Symbology

This document is intended for Kepler designers and developers. It is part of a proposed re-design and does not reflect visual design and functionality as it currently exists in Kepler. Comments and feedback are appreciated.

Please see the recent proposed Kepler redesign.

For background information on usability in general and Kepler usability, see Kepler Usability

The design rationale regarding symbology as listed in the proposed re-design are:

• Use a limited number of symbols/shapes.
• Use simple shapes.
• Use standard/known symbols or ones that are easily learned.
• Add some uniformity.

Feedback from a discussion on symbology at the recent Estes Park, CO meeting held May 2005 included:

• need to expand # of icons in current propopsal
• consider mechanism for communicating both composite form and its function (kind of composite) (Laura will work with the graphic designer to produce design)
• add "external program" icon (Laura will work with the graphic designer to produce design)
• need to define small set of types of computations (Need feedback from the team on this!)
• add "graphs" icon to display set of icons which would include scatter plots, bar graphs etc. (Laura will work with the graphic designer to produce the design)
• consider defining small set of atomic actors that go across ontologies and small set of icons for ecology domain -- LLD> issue here would still be that same kind of functions might be represented differently across ontologies
• consider tying symbols to semantics in ontology - LLD> but this might still lead to lots of icons
• consider providing a baseline set of symbols while controlling color but allow others to add their own symbols -- LLD> this could result in a large number of symbols and also could result in multiple symbols representing the same concept.
• web service (gear) seems to be based on "plumbing" rather than function so this was somewhat confusing. Gear will be reserved to possibly represent specifically some kind of low level grid service.
• some discussion on whether director should even be shown and whether is should be differentiated even further visually from an actor -- one idea was to consider just using the megaphone without the teal square as a background.

All feedback is welcome and encouraged, but what is needed foremost are suggestions for expanding the computation category to cover several top level types of computation such as integrals, summations etc. We will definitely add an "R" represention which will just be an "R" since that is the current and known symbol. I would also like to add "statistics" as a high level category.

What other types of high level categories of computation do you think need to be included? Remember we are trying to keep to a small set of symbols that specific actors can be categorized to.

For reference, here are the current symbols and the proposed symbols:

Director, File, and Display Actors



All other actors



Add comments to the bottom of this page and preface them with your initials or name etc. Thanks!

So far the suggestions for additions to the "computation" category are:

• LLD>R
• LLD>Integral
• LLD>Summation
• LLD>Statistics
• DDP>Equation
• DDP>Model (Statistical, mathematical, mechanistic, simulation, cellular automata, etc.)
• DDP>SpatialProcessing
• DDP>SignalProcessing