ChainGraph: A New Approach to Visualize Shared Properties in Resource Collections

Common graph visualizations tend to produce edge crossings and overlaps when used to display resource collections that are highly interrelated via shared properties. This hampers visual exploration and understanding of relationships between resources and can negatively affect information and knowledge management. In this paper, we present a new approach that visualizes resources and their shared properties in chains to prevent dense graphs and to better support the exploration of relationships. We explain the basic idea, describe an appropriate algorithm and discuss optimization issues. Furthermore, we report on a comparative evaluation showing that this kind of graph visualization supports particularly the visual tracking of relationships and the identification of commonalities between resources.