As model-driven engineering practitioners, we sometimes encounter weird modelling notations for the languages we use… and this is also definitely true for modelling language adopters!
We always end up wondering who could ever think about such or such terrible syntax for a language, also for very well established notations (including, for instance, some pieces of UML or BPMN). I take it for granted this is a common experience (raise your hand if not).
This lead to the idea that also syntax definition should be a more collaborative task. Therefore, we decided to give it a try and test whether crowdsourcing techniques can be used to create and validate language constructs, in particular, its concrete syntax (i.e. notation).
As part of our research work in this area, together with Jordi Cabot’s group, we have setup as an experiment a crowdsourcing campaign using our tool CrowdSearcher.
This boils down to a very simple case: we are asking anyone on the web to look into a very small subset of BPMN, and to participate into 3 simple tasks, including questions for selecting the best notation for some of the BPMN concepts (it won’t take more than 3 minutes).
We asked people to help us responding these 3 quick questions!
Some disclaimers:
1. we don’t care if you are the world’s expert in BPMN or if you never heard about it. We want you!
2. we ask you to register before taking the task (just click on the Register button once you enter the task), simply to make sure we only have one performance per person. All the analysis will run on anonymous data.
3. The results of the survey will be made publicly available in the following months.
To keep updated on my activities you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog or follow my twitter account (@MarcoBrambi).
Marco Brambilla 