Recent advances in graph drawing

Abstract

Graph drawing is a very active field and deals with the visualization of discrete structures in such a way that they are easy to read and understand. Apart from the classical applications of graph drawing, such as VLSI design and data base visualization, recently, new emerging application areas have arisen. E.g., in bioinformatics it is of growing interest to visualize biochemical networks such as protein interaction networks, regulatory and signaling pathways. In software engineering and for process modelling the visualization of UML class diagrams is getting increasingly important. For the analysis of the world wide web it is important to visualize internet connections. The new application areas demand new challenges to the field of graph drawing. One of the main current challenges is to deal effectively with very large graphs. Recent technological advances have brought increased data volumes and data complexity. Moreover, graph drawing has to deal with dynamic graphs that evolve over time. In this context, interactive visualization is getting increasingly important. Recently, in graph drawing a lot of effort has been spent to attack these problems. But also in classical topics like crossing minimization a lot of progress has been made. We give a survey on the recent trends and advances in graph drawing. This includes challenging new and classical problems as well as theoretical and practical algorithmic solutions and software tools. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.