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Diagrams have been used for over a millennium to communicate rich meaning for diverse purposes. Three major and persistent problems concerning our understanding of diagrams have been identified and must be addressed: 1. The variety of diagram types 2. Handling changes while retaining well formedness 3. Semantically mixed diagrams. A variety of both scientific and philosophical approaches to understanding diagrams is examined, and all are found unable to meet these challenges in full.

During an incident, which is critical in nature, sense-making by the individuals involved are essential in ensuring an optimal response to the incident. The incident management systems employed to manage the allocation of resources to an incident allow for the visualisation of the incident and its constituents, and this visualisation supports sense-making by improving knowledge transfer. Knowledge visualisation contains pitfalls that can be avoided by implementing knowledge visualisation criteria. The purpose of this study is to identify the knowledge visualisation criteria that optimise the knowledge transfer by visual artifacts in incident management systems like emergency medical or fire-response systems. This study used the design science research (DSR) methodology and was conducted in the context of critical incident response management. A review of the existing literature was done to identify an initial set of knowledge visualisation criteria. The initial set was evaluated by content experts (using questionnaire driven interviews) and usability experts (using questionnaire driven interviews, usability testing with eye tracking and a survey) in the context of an emergency incident management system. The main contribution of this study is a validated set of knowledge visualisation criteria to guide knowledge transfer in incident management systems. / School of Computing / M. Sc. Computing