A Space of Presentation Emphasis Techniques for Visualizing Graphs

The graph topo-visual formalism has been shown to be well-suited to the task of visualizing complex relations on a set of elements. Unfortunately, most visual formalisms do not scale very well. This observation is particularly true of graphs, which even when hand-drawn by an artist, are seldom meaningful when the number of nodes or links exceeds a very modest threshold typically only a few hundred elements. This severe limitation has prompted many researchers to seek altemative visualization techniques that may eliminate, or, at the very least, rajse this threshold. In this paper we analyze these recent efforts, describe an abstract space of presentation emphasis techniques, and locate the current approaches within this space. The contributions of this paper are several: (1) a significant portion of recent work is collected and reviewed; (2) a common set of criteria and a taxonomy of graph views are proposed; these, (3) permit a more direct comparison of previous work; which helps to, (4) identify common shortcomings and limitations; which in tum, (5) suggest future directions.