OnSet is a visualization technique that excels at visualizing large-scale binary set data.

To understand OnSet, let me walk you through an example.

Sets that are made up of the same underlying elements, eg. two proteins described through their amino acid compositions.

Some elements might be present in one set while absent in the other.

Let's take all the elements in the list and present them as squares.

We now remove the labels. The squares, thus, represent the elements in the set.

By positioning the square in a rectangular structure, we have a compact representation of a set.

The representation conveniently scales if the number of elements in the sets is larger.

We now have a representation that visualizes a set through the elements that it contains and does not contain.

By overlaying the two sets, we can view the elements that are present in both the sets.

We can configure the representation to show the union of the sets. Opacity represents the frequency of occurence of the elements.