Personalised resource categorisation using Euler Diagrams

Abstract

The categorisation of information is a very common practice. Often, the user may need to use multiple hierarchies or require multiple characterisations to be active at the same time, or they may wish to define cross-cutting groups for special purposes. The work developed in this paper is aimed at providing a flexible, seamless management of various ways of organising the required information. The concept of a set is adopted as the fundamental notion of information organisation, and, in particular, the familiar visual representation of sets and their relationships in terms of Euler Diagrams is used. We facilitate the visualisation of sets, enabling the application of functions to items presented in regions of the diagram corresponding to set, or category, intersections. We present a system that realises this novel concept, together with rationale for the choices made in its development, as well as a simple scenario of use. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.