A family S of convex sets in the plane defines a hypergraph H = (S, E) as
follows. Every subfamily S' of S defines a hyperedge of H if and only if there
exists a halfspace h that fully contains S' , and no other set of S is fully
contained in h. In this case, we say that h realizes S'. We say a set S is
shattered, if all its subsets are realized. The VC-dimension of a hypergraph H
is the size of the largest shattered set. We show that the VC-dimension for
pairwise disjoint convex sets in the plane is bounded by 3, and this is tight.
In contrast, we show the VC-dimension of convex sets in the plane (not
necessarily disjoint) is unbounded. We provide a quadratic lower bound in the
number of pairs of intersecting sets in a shattered family of convex sets in
the plane. We also show that the VC-dimension is unbounded for pairwise
disjoint convex sets in R^d , for d > 2. We focus on, possibly intersecting,
segments in the plane and determine that the VC-dimension is always at most 5.
And this is tight, as we construct a set of five segments that can be
shattered. We give two exemplary applications. One for a geometric set cover
problem and one for a range-query data structure problem, to motivate our
findings.