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Design Study of LineSets, a Novel Set Visualization Technique
Dec. 2011 (vol. 17 no. 12)
pp. 2259-2267
ASCII Text
x 
 
Basak Alper, Nathalie Riche, Gonzalo Ramos, Mary Czerwinski, "Design Study of LineSets, a Novel Set Visualization Technique," IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 17, no. 12, pp. 2259-2267, Dec., 2011.
 
 
BibTex
x
 
@article{ 10.1109/TVCG.2011.186,
author = {Basak Alper and Nathalie Riche and Gonzalo Ramos and Mary Czerwinski},
title = {Design Study of LineSets, a Novel Set Visualization Technique},
journal ={IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics},
volume = {17},
number = {12},
issn = {1077-2626},
year = {2011},
pages = {2259-2267},
doi = {http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TVCG.2011.186},
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
address = {Los Alamitos, CA, USA},
}
 
 
RefWorks Procite/RefMan/Endnote
x 
 
TY - JOUR
JO - IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
TI - Design Study of LineSets, a Novel Set Visualization Technique
IS - 12
SN - 1077-2626
SP2259
EP2267
EPD - 2259-2267
A1 - Basak Alper,
A1 - Nathalie Riche,
A1 - Gonzalo Ramos,
A1 - Mary Czerwinski,
PY - 2011
KW - Set visualization
KW - clustering
KW - faceted data visualization
KW - graph visualization.
VL - 17
JA - IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
ER -
 
Basak Alper, Microsoft Research, UC Santa Barbara
Nathalie Riche, Microsoft Research
Gonzalo Ramos, Microsoft Research
Mary Czerwinski, Microsoft Research
Computing and visualizing sets of elements and their relationships is one of the most common tasks one performs when analyzing and organizing large amounts of data. Common representations of sets such as convex or concave geometries can become cluttered and difficult to parse when these sets overlap in multiple or complex ways, e.g., when multiple elements belong to multiple sets. In this paper, we present a design study of a novel set visual representation, LineSets, consisting of a curve connecting all of the set's elements. Our approach to design the visualization differs from traditional methodology used by the InfoVis community. We first explored the potential of the visualization concept by running a controlled experiment comparing our design sketches to results from the state-of-the-art technique. Our results demonstrated that LineSets are advantageous for certain tasks when compared to concave shapes. We discuss an implementation of LineSets based on simple heuristics and present a study demonstrating that our generated curves do as well as human-drawn ones. Finally, we present two applications of our technique in the context of search tasks on a map and community analysis tasks in social networks.

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Index Terms:
Set visualization, clustering, faceted data visualization, graph visualization.
Citation:
Basak Alper, Nathalie Riche, Gonzalo Ramos, Mary Czerwinski, "Design Study of LineSets, a Novel Set Visualization Technique," IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 17, no. 12, pp. 2259-2267, Dec. 2011, doi:10.1109/TVCG.2011.186
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