ADIGE: Automatic Diagram Generation

EPSRC funded project EP/J010898/1

Diagrams are an effective means of conveying a wide variety of different sources of information. The automatic generation of diagrams is essential for tasks such as the presentation of multiple views of large scale data sets (e.g. ontology analysis benefits from viewing information revolving around particular relationships). Enabling multiple significant relationships to be clearly presented greatly enhances the utility of visualisations (e.g. consider social network information presented as a diagram with graph edges used to depict the friends’ relationship and containing curves to simultaneously indicate overlapping interest groups). The project aims to develop a unified framework for automatic diagram generation, allowing a mixture of features from different diagram types and enhancing control over layout; these theoretical advances are an essential precursor to use in practice. The project will provide significant academic impact (advances in the field, plus interaction between researchers in distinct fields) and industrial impact (improved support for ontology analysts, thereby reducing costs of product development cycles), and societal impact (enhanced communication between researchers and the public via improved visualisation capabilities). The involvement of prominent academics from related fields and project partner Nokia will help to ensure the success of the project and assist in achieving long term impact.

The development of a unified framework for the automatic generation of a wide class of diagrams will harmonise and extend state of the art research from several different fields, bringing together the emerging field of Euler diagrams with the expanding field of Graph Drawing and the established mathematical field of Knot Theory. The three diagram types considered provide a good coverage of a large class of diagrammatic systems, especially when considering combining their features. The project will deliver the ability to automatically generate diagrams based on closed curves that utilise both crossing and region based information, as well as mixed graph and curve-based diagrams. Alongside the advancement of generation techniques, enhanced control of the layout features of individual diagram types will be provided.

People

Principal Investigator

Andrew Fish, University of Brighton, UK (send email). Please contact me for further information regarding the project.

Research Fellow

The post-doctoral worker for the project is Rafiq Saleh.

Collaborators

Gennaro Costagliola, Università di Salerno, Italy
Roger Fenn, University of Sussex, UK
Kim Marriott, Monash University, Australia
Ian Oliver, Nokia, Finland

Project Publications

• Paolo Bottoni, Gennaro Costagliola and Andrew Fish. Euler Diagram encodings. In Proceedings of the 7th international conference on the Theory and Application of Diagrams, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 7352, pages 148-162, 2012..