Exploring Complex Drawings via Edge Stratification

Abstract

Abstract. We propose an approach that allows a user to explore a layout produced by any graph drawing algorithm, in order to reduce the visual complexity and clarify its presentation. Our approach is based on stratifying the drawing into layers with desired properties; layers can be explored and combined by the user to gradually acquire details. We present stratification heuristics, a user study, and an experimental analysis that evaluates how our stratification heuristics behave on the drawings computed by a variety of popular force-directed algorithms.

Exploring the limits of complexity: A survey of empirical studies on graph visualisation

“…Nine additional studies use graphs with more than 200 nodes. Similar to the above, some of these studies only show subparts of the network [34,82,101,133], while some evaluate tools that scale well with large networks [26,27,34,52,53,59,82,133]. Four out of these nine studies have also used networks with less than 100 nodes.…”

“…Many evaluate tools or techniques which, by design, scale well to handle graphs with a large number of edges. For example, a study by Giacomo et al [52] evaluates a technique that highlights edges in order to enhance the readability of graphs that have many edge crossings. Another category of studies that use a large number of edges, evaluate visualisations (e.g.…”

“…There are only 28 studies that use graphs with 1,000 edges or more. Most of these allow the participants to look at parts of the network instead of performing the task on the whole network [12,37,52,56,82,85,88,94,95,99,101,102,117,120,124,129,132,136,146,152]. Similar to studies that use a large number of nodes to highlight the benefits of aggregation or interaction methods, some studies use a large number of edges to show the benefits of edge compression, bundling, or highlighting techniques.…”

Experiments and a User Study for Hierarchical Drawings of Graphs

“…We asked the users to answer a set of questions for the two different drawings and carry out a sequence of basic tasks. Similar to previous user studies (see, e.g., [29], [30], [31], [32]), we decided to choose tasks involving graph reading which are easily understandable also to non-expert users. Moreover, we also took into account that the purpose was to evaluate hierarchical drawings and as expected some tasks such as counting incoming or outgoing edges were rather simple and they would produce useful insights.…”