Difference Metrics for Interactive Orthogonal Graph Drawing Algorithms

Preserving the “mental map” is a major goal of interactive graph drawing algorithms. Several models have been proposed for formalizing the notion of mental map. Additional work needs to be done to formulate and validate “difference” metrics which can be used in practice. This paper introduces a framework for defining and validating metrics to measure the difference between two drawings of the same graph, and gives a preliminary experimental analysis of several simple metrics.