Temporal Visualization of Sets and Their Relationships Using Time-Sets

Abstract

Visual representation of sets and their relationships is valuable in many application areas. There are numerous categories of set visualizations, each with their own particular representation of sets using areas, lines, matrices, etc. All these existing visualizations, however, represent sets statically in time, without much consideration for comparisons of set cardinalities and relationships across time. In this paper, we describe a new visualization, called time-sets, which has been designed to support temporal comparisons of set cardinalities and their relationships. We also present a comparative case study of articles published by several online news sources over a period of time, to demonstrate the application of time-sets in this novel area using a prototype visualization tool we have developed for this specific purpose.