End User Controlled Visualizationof Large Graphs

Directed and undirected graphs provide a natural notation for describing many fundamental structures of computer science. Unfortunately, graphs are hard to draw in an easy to read fashion. Traditional graph layout algorithms have focused on creating good layouts for the entire graph. This approach works well with smaller graphs, but often cannot produce readable layouts for large graphs. This paper presents a novel methodology for viewing large graphs, which allows, the user to interactively navigate through large graphs, learning about them in appropriately small and concise pieces. The motivation of this approach is that large graphs contain too much information to be conveyed by a single canonical layout. For a user to be able to understand the data encoded in the graph, he or she must be able to carve up the graph into manageable pieces and then create custom layouts that match his or her current interests. The presented methodology contains three new concepts for supporting interactive graph layout: interactive decomposition of large graphs, end-user speciied layout algorithms, and parameterized layout algorithms.