Ajilon Senior Consultant and thought leader, Dr Daniel Moody, delivered a research seminar at The University of Sydney on Friday May 28 on the theme, The “Physics” of Notations: Towards a Scientific Basis for Constructing Visual Notations in Software Engineering.

Daniel says his presentation was based on a paper he wrote that was published in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, the world's number one software engineering journal, in December last year.

“In a nutshell, my paper defines a set of principles for designing cognitively effective visual notations. Visual notations have been used in software engineering since its earliest beginnings, and even before - the first one was designed by Golstine and von Neumann in 1946 - but surprisingly, this is the first time someone has tried to do this.”

Daniel says he received a phone call last month from Grady Booch, one of the architects of UML (the industry standard language for software engineering), who is now Chief Scientist at IBM.

“He [Booch] told me he loved the paper and only wished he had this when they designed UML - if so, things could have been very different.

"Even more exciting, the principles have been recently proposed as an international standard for designing visual notations for all engineering disciplines, not just software engineering. The proposal is going through the ITU-T, which has reciprocal agreements with ISO. This means that the research could have implications far beyond the IT field.”

A seasoned public speaker, Daniel delivered a similar presentation to National ICT Australia (NICTA) on Wednesday last week and is one of a growing number of Ajilon thought leaders, such as Graham Witt, John Sanders and Yulia Merrill, who are regularly invited to speak at industry symposiums and events.

To read Daniel's paper, open the attached PDF.

Interesting fact: Daniel tells us that the Computer Science department at The University of Sydney is the oldest Computer Science department in Australia, and even the world - if his sources are correct, it is possibly tied with Purdue University in the USA.