Visual notation interpretation and ambiguities

This chapter introduces a classification of ambiguities in Visual Languages and discusses the ambiguities that occur in Spatial Visual Query Languages. It is adopted the definition of Visual Language, given in (Bottoni et al. 1995), as a set of Visual Sentence, each formed by an image, a description, an interpretation function and a materialization function. It is proposed a distinction between ambiguities produced by 1-n relationship between an image and its description, and ambiguities due to imprecision produced by the user's behaviour during the interaction. Furthermore, the authors hope that this comprehensive classification of ambiguities may assist in the definition of Visual Languages, in order to allow the user to communicate through visual notations by avoiding to formulate sentences that have multiple interpretations.