Drawing Euler Diagrams with Circles

Euler diagrams are a popular and intuitive visualization tool which are used in a wide variety of application areas, including biological and medical data analysis. As with other data visualization methods, such as graphs, bar charts, or pie charts, the automated generation of an Euler diagram from a suitable data set would be advantageous, removing the burden of manual data analysis and the subsequent task of drawing an appropriate diagram. To this end, various methods have emerged that automatically draw Euler diagrams from abstract descriptions of them. One such method draws some, but not all, abstract descriptions using only circles. We extend that method so that more abstract descriptions can be drawn with circles. Furthermore, we show how to transform any `undrawable' abstract description into a drawable one. Thus, given any abstract description, our method produces a drawing using only circles. The method has been implemented in a software tool available for download.