From November 14 to 18, 2022, a Dagstuhl-Seminar addressed the topic of set visualization and uncertainty. Set visualization deals with algorithms and visual methods to help people understand and make sense of sets, their elements, and relations thereof. However, when there is uncertainty involved, the implications for set visualization remain under-researched.
At Schloss Dagstuhl, an international team of experts discussed strategies to deal with this research question. Several working groups laid out a foundation for considering uncertainty in set visualization and identified algorithmic and visualization design challenges to be tackled in future work. Prof. Christian Tominski from the chair of Visual Analytics contributed to the development of a conceptual framework that brings together the information that is primarily relevant in sets (i.e., set membership, set attributes, and element attributes) and different plausible categories of (un)certainty (i.e., certainty, uncertainty as a binary fact, and uncertainty as quantifiable measure).
The research done in the Dagstuhl-Seminar will soon be leveraged at the Institute for Visual and Analytic Computing, where Dr. Sebastian Bader from the chair of Mobile Multimedia Information Systems is already giving a lecture on "Reasoning under Uncertainty". It is planned to engage in a joint research effort to further investigate the questions of how to make sense of uncertain data and how to communicate information about uncertainty to human users.