Confluent drawing algorithms using rectangular dualization

Abstract

The need of effective drawings for non-planar dense graphs is motivated by the wealth of applications in which they occur, including social network analysis, security visualization and web clustering engines, just to name a few. One common issue graph drawings are affected by is the visual clutter due to the high number of (possibly intersecting) edges to display. Confluent drawings address this problem by bundling groups of edges sharing the same path, resulting in a representation with less edges and no edge intersections. In this paper we describe how to create a confluent drawing of a graph from its rectangular dual and we show two important advantages of this approach. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.