An Heuristic for the Construction of Intersection Graphs

Most methods for generating Euler diagrams describe the detection of the general structure of the final drawing as the first step. This information is generally encoded using a graph, where nodes are the regions to be represented and edges represent adjacency. A planar drawing of this graph will then indicate how to draw the sets in order to depict all the set intersections. In this paper we present an heuristic to construct this structure, the intersection graph. The final Euler diagram can be constructed by drawing the sets boundaries around the nodes of the intersection graph, either manually or automatically.