Numerous visual notations are present in technical and business domains. Notations have to be cognitively effective to ease the planning, documentation, and communication of the domains’ concepts. Semantic transparency (ST) is one of the elementary principles that influence notations’ cognitive effectiveness. However, the principle is criticized for not being well defined and challenges arise in the evaluations and applications of ST. Accordingly, this research’s objectives were to answer how the ST principle is defined, operationalized, and evaluated in present notations as well as applied in the design of new notations in ICT and related areas. To meet these objectives, a systematic literature review was conducted with 94 studies passing the selection process criteria. The results reject one of the three aspects, which define semantic transparency, namely “ST is achieved with the use of icons.” Besides, taxonomies of related concepts and research methods, evaluation metrics, and other findings from this study can help to conduct verifiable ST-related experiments and applications, consequently improving the visual vocabularies of notations and effectiveness of the resulting diagrams.

在技​​术和业务领域中存在许多视觉符号。符号必须在认知上有效，以简化领域概念的规划，文档编制和沟通。语义透明性（ST）是影响符号的认知效果的基本原理之一。但是，由于该原则定义不明确而受到批评，ST的评估和应用中出现了挑战。因此，本研究的目的是回答如何在当前符号中定义，操作和评估ST原理，以及如何将其应用于ICT和相关领域的新符号设计中。为了实现这些目标，对94项通过选择过程标准的研究进行了系统的文献综述。结果拒绝了三个方面之一，定义了语义透明性，即“使用图标即可实现ST”。此外，相关概念和研究方法，评估指标以及本研究中的其他发现的分类法可以帮助进行可验证的与ST相关的实验和应用，从而提高注释的视觉词汇和结果图的有效性。