Special Issue on Selected papers from the Twenty-third International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization, GD 2015
An Incremental Layout Method for Visualizing Online Dynamic Graphs
Vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 55-80, 2017. Regular paper.
Abstract Having the ability to draw dynamic graphs is key to better understanding evolving relationships and analyzing the patterns and trends in a network. Traditional force-directed methods are not suitable for laying out dynamic graphs because of their design for static graphs. An alternative is to create an incremental version of the force multilevel multi-pole method ($FM^3$); however, previous solutions are more susceptible to graph degradation, that is, graph illegibility due to long edges or edge crossings. This is typically caused when distant components are connected, resulting in long and overlapping edges. We present our incremental version of $FM^3$ with a refinement scheme, which solves this problem by ``refining" the parts of the graph with high energy. Our resulting visualization maintains readability of the graph structure and is efficient in laying out these changing networks. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method by comparing it with two previous online dynamic graph methods.
Submitted: November 2015.
Reviewed: March 2016.
Revised: May 2016.
Reviewed: August 2016.
Revised: September 2016.
Accepted: October 2016.
Final: November 2016.
Published: January 2017.
Communicated by Emilio Di Giacomo and Anna Lubiw
article (PDF)