Graph drawing

In mathematics and computer science, graph drawing combines methods from geometric graph theory and information visualization to derive two-dimensional depictions of graphs.

Description

A drawing of a graph or network diagram is a pictorial representation of the vertices and edges of a graph.

This drawing should not be confused with the graph itself: very different layouts can correspond to the same graph.

In the abstract, all that matters is which pairs of vertices are connected by edges.

In the concrete, however, the arrangement of these vertices and edges within a drawing affects its understandability, usability, fabrication cost, and aesthetics.

The problem gets worse, if the graph changes over time by adding and deleting edges (dynamic graph drawing) and the goal is to preserve the user's mental map.

Applications

Applications for graph drawing include:

• Social network analysis
• Cartography
• Linguistics
• Bioinformatics

Application-specific graph drawings

Graphs and graph drawings arising in other areas of application include:

• Sociograms, drawings of a social network, as often offered by social network analysis software
• Hasse diagrams, a type of graph drawing specialized to partial orders
• Dessin d'enfants, a type of graph drawing used in algebraic geometry
• State diagrams, graphical representations of finite state machines
• Computer network diagrams, depictions of the nodes and connections in a computer network
• Flow charts, drawings in which the nodes represent the steps of an algorithm and the edges represent control flow between steps.
• Data flow diagrams, drawings in which the nodes represent the components of an information system and the edges represent the movement of information from one component to another.
• Bioinformatics, including phylogenetic trees, protein-protein interaction networks, and metabolic pathways.

Graph drawing software

Software, systems, and providers of systems for drawing graphs include:

• BioFabric, open-source software from the Institute of Systems Biology for visualizing large networks by drawing nodes as horizontal lines
• Cytoscape, open-source software for visualizing molecular interaction networks
• Gephi, open-source network analysis and visualization software
• Graphviz, an open-source graph drawing system from AT&T Corporation
• Mathematica, a general purpose computation tool that includes 2D and 3D graph visualization and graph analysis tools
• Microsoft Automatic Graph Layout, a .NET library (formerly called GLEE) for laying out graphs
• Tom Sawyer Perspectives, software for building class graph and data visualization and analysis applications
• Tulip (software), an open source data visualization tool
• yEd, a graph editor with graph layout functionality
• PGF/TikZ 3.0 with the graphdrawing package (requires LuaTeX)

See also

• Geometric graph theory
• Graph (discrete mathematics)
• Graph theory
• Gravisto - graph drawing software.

External links

• Graph drawing @ Wikipedia