Fully Automatic Visualisation of Overlapping Sets

Paolo Simonetto (1, 2) , David Auber (1, 2) , Daniel Archambault (2)

1 LaBRI - Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique
2 GRAVITE - Graph Visualization and Interactive Exploration

Visualisation of taxonomies and sets has recently become an active area of research. Many application fields now require more than a strict classification of elements into a hierarchy tree. Euler diagrams, one of the most natural ways of depicting intersecting sets, may provide a solution to these problems. In this paper, we present an approach for the automatic generation of Euler-like diagrams. This algorithm differs from previous approaches in that it has no undrawable instances of input, allowing it to be used in systems where the output is always required. We also improve the readability of Euler diagrams through the use of Bezier curves and transparent coloured textures. Our approach has been implemented using the Tulip platform. Both the source and executable program used to generate the results are freely available.

Domains: Information Retrieval [cs.IR]

Paolo Simonetto, David Auber, Daniel Archambault. Fully Automatic Visualisation of Overlapping Sets. Computer Graphics Forum, 2009, 28 (3), pp.967-974. ⟨hal-00407269⟩