A New Graph Drawing Scheme for Social Network

Abstract

With the development of social networks, people have started to use social network tools to record their life and work more and more frequently. How to analyze social networks to explore potential characteristics and trend of social events has been a hot research topic. In order to analyze it effectively, a kind of techniques called information visualization is employed to extract the potential information from the large scale of social network data and present the information briefly as visualized graphs. In the process of information visualization, graph drawing is a crucial part. In this paper, we study the graph layout algorithms and propose a new graph drawing scheme combining multilevel and single-level drawing approaches, including the graph division method based on communities and refining approach based on partitioning strategy. Besides, we compare the effectiveness of our scheme and FM 3 in experiments. The experiment results show that our scheme can achieve a clearer diagram and effectively extract the community structure of the social network to be applied to drawing schemes.