An object-oriented design for graph visualization

Abstract

Many applications, from everyday file system browsers to visual programming tools, require the display of network and graph structures. The Graph Visualization Framework (GVF) (available at http://www.cwi.nl/InfoVisu/GVF) is an architecture that supports the tasks common to most graph browsers and editors. This article gives a brief overview of the design of the GVF and focuses on the core classes that are used to represent and manipulate graphs. The design of the core classes is justified by the requirements for navigation and visualization.