397 research outputs found
LinSets.zip: Compressing Linear Set Diagrams
Linear diagrams are used to visualize set systems by depicting set
memberships as horizontal line segments in a matrix, where each set is
represented as a row and each element as a column. Each such line segment of a
set is shown in a contiguous horizontal range of cells of the matrix indicating
that the corresponding elements in the columns belong to the set. As each set
occupies its own row in the matrix, the total height of the resulting
visualization is as large as the number of sets in the instance. Such a linear
diagram can be visually sparse and intersecting sets containing the same
element might be represented by distant rows. To alleviate such undesirable
effects, we present LinSets.zip, a new approach that achieves a more
space-efficient representation of linear diagrams. First, we minimize the total
number of gaps in the horizontal segments by reordering columns, a criterion
that has been shown to increase readability in linear diagrams. The main
difference of LinSets.zip to linear diagrams is that multiple non-intersecting
sets can be positioned in the same row of the matrix. Furthermore, we present
several different rendering variations for a matrix-based representation that
utilize the proposed row compression. We implemented the different steps of our
approach in a visualization pipeline using integer-linear programming, and
suitable heuristics aiming at sufficiently fast computations in practice. We
conducted both a quantitative evaluation and a small-scale user experiment to
compare the effects of compressing linear diagrams.Comment: To be presented at PacificVis 202
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