Abstract
Network data often contain important attributes from various dimensions such as social affiliations and areas of expertise in a social network. If such attributes exhibit a tree structure, visualizing a compound graph consisting of tree and network structures becomes complicated. How to visually reveal patterns of a network over a tree has not been fully studied. In this paper, we propose a compound graph model, TreeNet, to support visualization and analysis of a network at multiple levels of aggregation over a tree. We also present a visualization design, TreeNetViz, to offer the multiscale and cross-scale exploration and interaction of a TreeNet graph. TreeNetViz uses a Radial, Space-Filling (RSF) visualization to represent the tree structure, a circle layout with novel optimization to show aggregated networks derived from TreeNet, and an edge bundling technique to reduce visual complexity. Our circular layout algorithm reduces both total edge-crossings and edge length and also considers hierarchical structure constraints and edge weight in a TreeNet graph. These experiments illustrate that the algorithm can reduce visual cluttering in TreeNet graphs. Our case study also shows that TreeNetViz has the potential to support the analysis of a compound graph by revealing multiscale and cross-scale network patterns.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | 6065012 |
Pages (from-to) | 2449-2458 |
Number of pages | 10 |
Journal | IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics |
Volume | 17 |
Issue number | 12 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2011 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Software
- Signal Processing
- Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
- Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design