An Extended High-Dimensional Method for Interactive Graph Drawing

Graph drawing is an information visualization technology for illustrating relations between objects. Interactive graph drawing is often important since it is difficult to statically lay out complex graphs. For the interactive drawing of general undirected graphs, we previously proposed the high-dimensional approach, which used static graph layouts in high-dimensional spaces to dynamically find two-dimensional layouts according to user interaction. Although the resulting interactive graph drawing method was fast, it imposed a limitation on the successive manipulation of dense parts of graphs. In this paper, we propose an extended method to tackle the limitation. Our new method enables multiple graph nodes to be controlled simultaneously in interactive graph drawing. For this purpose, we extend the underlying constraint programming mechanism by introducing the notion of soft constraints as well as by using additional constraints on multiple controlled nodes.