Readable representations for large-scale bipartite graphs

Abstract

Bipartite graphs appear in various scenes in the real world, and visualizing these graphs helps improve our understanding of network structures. The amount of information that is available to us has increased dramatically in recent years, and it is therefore necessary to develop a drawing technique that corresponds to large-scale graphs. In this paper, we describe drawing methods to make large-scale bipartite graphs easy to read. We propose two techniques: "node contraction drawing," which involves collecting similar nodes and drawing them as one node, and "isosimilarity contour drawing," which puts clusters into an outlined area. We developed interactive user interfaces for the drawing methods and conducted an evaluation experiment to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.