Edinburgh Napier University

  Clutter in a diagram can be broadly defined as how visually complex the diagram is. It may be that different users perceive clutter in different ways, however. Moreover, it has been shown that, for certain types of diagrams and tasks, an increase in clutter negatively affects task performance, making quantifying clutter an important problem. In the paper associated with this dataset, we investigated the perceived clutter in concept diagrams, a visual language used for representing ontologies. Using perceptual theory and existing research on clutter for other diagrams, we proposed five plausible measures for assigning clutter scores to concept diagrams. By performing an empirical study we evaluated each of these proposed measures against participants' rankings of diagrams. Whilst more than one of our measures showed strong correlation with perceived clutter, our results suggest that a measure based on the number of points where lines cross is the most appropriate way to quantify clutter for concept diagrams. This dataset includes all the diagrams, study materials, and output from the study. It was collected in summer 2016, with the paper published in autumn 2016.