Ahtract-Diagrams are widely used in several areas of computer wience, and their effectiveness is thoroughly recognized. One of the main qualities requested for them is readability; this is especially, but not exclusively, true in the area of information systems, where diagrams are used to model data and functions of the application. Up to now, diagrams have been produced manually or with the aid of a graphic editor; in both caws placement of symbols and routing of connections are under responsi-bility of the designer. The goal of the work is to investigate how readability of diagrams can be achieved by means of automatic tools. Existing results in the literature are compared, and a comprehensive algorithmic approach to the problem is proposed. The algorithm presented draws graphs on a grid and is suitable for both undirected graphs and mixed graphs that contain as subgraphs hierarchic structures. Finally, several applications of a graphic tool that embodies the aforementioned facility are shown. I.

In this paper we present an extensive experimental study comparing four general-purpose graph drawing algorithms. The four algorithms take as input general graphs (with no restrictions whatsoever on connectivity, planarity, etc.) and construct orthogonal grid drawings, which are widely used in software and database visualization applications. The test data (available by anonymous ftp) are 11,582 graphs, ranging from 10 to 100 vertices, which have been generated from a core set of 112 graphs used in "real-life" software engineering and database applications. The experiments

In the mid 1980s, graphics workstations became the main platforms for software and information engineers. Since then, visualization of relational information has become an essential element of software systems. Graphs are commonly used to model relational information. They are depicted on a graphics workstation as graph drawings. The usefulness of the relational model depends on whether the graph drawings effectively convey the relational information to the users. This thesis is concerned with finding good drawings of graphs. As the amount of information that we want to visualize becomes larger and the relations become more complex, the classical graph model tends to be inadequate. Many extended models use a node hierarchy to help cope with the complexity. This thesis introduces a new graph model called the clustered graph. The central theme of the thesis is an investigation of efficient algorithms to produce good drawings for clustered graphs. Although the criteria for judging the qua...

Automatic layout algorithms are commonly used when displaying graphs on the screen because they provide a "nice" drawing of the graph without user intervention. There are, however, a couple of disadvantages to automatic layout. Without user intervention, an automatic layout algorithm is only capable of producing an aesthetically pleasing drawing of the graph. User- or application-specified layout constraints (often concerning the semantics of a graph) are difficult or impossible to specify. A second problem is that automatic layout algorithms seldom make use of information in the currentlayout when calculating the new layout. This can also be frustrating to the user because whenever a new layout is done, the user's orientation in the graph is lost. This paper suggests using layout constraints to solve both of these problems. We showhow user-speci#ed layout constraints may be easily added to many automatic graph layout algorithms. Additionally, the constraints specified by the current layou...

We introduce a new approach for drawing diagrams. Our approach is to use a technique we call confluent drawing for visualizing non-planar graphs in a planar way. This approach allows us to draw, in a crossing-free manner, graphs—such as software interaction diagrams—that would normally have many crossings. The main idea of this approach is quite simple: we allow groups of edges to be merged together and drawn as “tracks” (similar to train tracks). Producing such confluent drawings automatically from a graph with many crossings is quite challenging, however, we offer a heuristic algorithm (one version for undirected graphs and one version for directed ones) to test if a non-planar graph can be drawn efficiently in a confluent way. In addition, we identify several large classes of graphs that can be completely categorized as being either confluently drawable or confluently non-drawable.

In this paper we present an extensive experimental study...

Several applications use algorithms for drawing k-layered networks and, in particular, 2-layered networks (i.e. bipartite graphs). Bipartite graphs are commonly drawn in the plane so that all vertices lie on two parallel vertical lines, and an important requirement in drawing such graphs is to minimize edge crossings. Such a problem is NP-complete even when the position of the vertices on one layer is held fixed. This paper presents a heuristic, called the assignment heuristic, for edge crossing minimization in bipartite graphs, which works by reducing the problem to an assignment problem. The main idea of the assignment heuristic is to position simultaneously all the vertices of one layer, so that the mutual interaction of the position of all the vertices can be taken into account. We also show that the idea underlying the assignment heuristic can be effectively applied in other cases requiring edge crossing minimization. Index Terms - Graph layout, crossing reduction, bipartite gra...

Document retrieval is a highly interactive process dealing with large amounts of information. Visual representations can provide both a means for managing the complexity of large information structures and an interface style well suited to interactive manipulation. The system we have designed utilizes visually displayed graphic structures and a direct manipulation interface style to supply an integrated environment for retrieval. A common visually displayed network structure is used for query, document content, and term relations. A query can be modified through direct manipulation of its visual form by incorporating terms from any other information structure the system displays. An associative thesaurus of terms and an inter-document network provide information about a document collection that can complement other retrieval aids. Visualization of these large data structures makes use of fisheye views and overview diagrams to help overcome some of the inherent difficulties of orientation and navigation in large information structures.

In this paper we investigate the general position model for the drawing of arbitrary degree graphs in the D-dimensional (D >= 2) orthogonal grid. In this model no two vertices lie in the same grid hyperplane.

We consider the problem of drawing plane graphs with an arbitrarily high vertex degree orthogonally into the plane such that the number of bends on the edges should be minimized. It has been known how to achieve the bend minimum without any respect to the size of the vertices. Naturally, the vertices should be represented by uniformly small squares. In addition we might require that each face should be represented by a non-empty region. This would allow a labeling of the faces. We present an efficient algorithm which provably achieves the bend minimum following these constraints. Omitting the latter requirement we conjecture that the problem becomes NP-hard. For that case, we give advices for good approximations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches giving some interesting examples.