Visualizing graphs - A generalized view

Abstract

The visualization of graphs has proven to be very useful for exploring structures in different application domains. However, in certain fields of computer science, graph visualization is understood and focused quite differently. While "graph drawing" focuses on optimized layouts for nodelink-representations of networks, "information visualization" prefers to work on hierarchies focusing on very large structures, different views and interactivity. This paper gives a systematic view of the problem of graph visualization by combining both approaches. We will introduce a general view of different visualization methods as well as describe occurring problems and discuss basic constraints. These will be used to propose a visualization framework for graphs, whose development motivated this paper. © 2006 IEEE.