MetroSets: Visualizing Sets as Metro Maps

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Ben Jacobsen, Markus Wallinger, Stephen Kobourov, Martin Nöllenburg

 External link (DOI) 

 View presentation:2020-10-29T17:15:00ZGMT-0600Change your timezone on the schedule page
2020-10-29T17:15:00Z

Exemplar figure — MetroSets pipeline: The input set system (here: characters of The Simpsons) is first compressed into a combinatorially equivalent smaller instance; Step 1 creates an optimized path support graph; Step 2 reinserts temporarily discarded elements; Step 3 creates an initial layout of the support graph; finally Step 4 schematizes the layout as a metro map and places the labels.

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Direct link to video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/FN-xYlByE64

Keywords

Set visualization, metro map metaphor, hypergraphs

Abstract

We propose MetroSets, a new, flexible online tool for visualizing set systems using the metro map metaphor. We model a given set system as a hypergraph H = (V; S), consisting of a set V of vertices and a set S, which contains subsets of V called hyperedges. Our system then computes a metro map representation of H, where each hyperedge E in S corresponds to a metro line and each vertex corresponds to a metro station. Vertices that appear in two or more hyperedges are drawn as interchanges in the metro map, connecting the different sets. MetroSets is based on a modular 4-step pipeline which constructs and optimizes a path-based hypergraph support, which is then drawn and schematized using metro map layout algorithms. We propose and implement multiple algorithms for each step of the MetroSet pipeline and provide a functional prototype with easy-to-use preset configurations. Furthermore, using several real-world datasets, we perform an extensive quantitative evaluation of the impact of different pipeline stages on desirable properties of the generated maps, such as octolinearity, monotonicity, and edge uniformity.