Indeterminate Set Space Diagrams

A diagrammatic system is presented, which combines benefits of Euler and Venn diagrams. As a tool intended for teaching, easy-to-use diagrams are desired. Their underlying geometry is motivated by insights from cognitive psychology, to make the diagrams easily accessible to humans. The price of simple diagrams is a restriction in expressiveness. But, enriching the diagrams with a syntactical refinement increases their expressiveness, enabling the distinction between determinate and indeterminate information. This facilitates their employment as minimal abstract, and simultaneously, as limited abstract systems. As a consequence, this new representation offers both, a focus on the relevant relationships, like in Euler diagrams, and the possibility to take into account all set intersections, like in Venn diagrams. The former enables a simple visual mode, that makes it easy to comprehend relations of determined information – at the minimal abstraction level. The latter allows the exhaustive analysis of all potential relationships of indeterminate information – at the limited abstraction level.