Exploring the notion of 'clutter' in Euler diagrams

Abstract

Euler diagrams are an effective and intuitive way of representing relationships between sets. As the number of sets represented grows, Euler diagrams can become ‘cluttered’ and lose some of their intuitive appeal. In this paper we consider various measures of ‘clutter’ for abstract Euler diagrams and show that they compare well with results obtained from an empirical study. We also show that all abstract Euler diagrams can be constructed inductively by inserting a contour at a time and we relate this inductive description to the clutter metrics.