3D Geographic Network Displays

Abstract

Many types of information may be represented as graphs or networks with the nodes corresponding to entities and the links to relationships between entities. Often there is geographical information associated with the network. The traditional way to visualize geographic networks employs node and link displays on a two-dimensional map. These displays are easily overwhelmed, and for large networks become visually cluttered and confusing. To overcome these problems we have invented five novel network views that generalize the traditional displays. Two of the views show the complete network, while the other three concentrate on a portion of a larger network defined by connectivity to a given node. Our new visual metaphors retain many of the well-known advantages of the traditional network maps, while exploiting three-dimensional graphics to address some of the fundamental problems limiting the scalability of two-dimensional displays.