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A Visualization Framework and User Studies for Overloaded Orthogonal Drawings
Author(s) -
Didimo Walter,
Kornaropoulos Evgenios M.,
Montecchiani Fabrizio,
Tollis Ioannis G.
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
computer graphics forum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.578
H-Index - 120
eISSN - 1467-8659
pISSN - 0167-7055
DOI - 10.1111/cgf.13266
Subject(s) - visualization , computer science , graph drawing , usability , graph , theoretical computer science , information visualization , directed graph , data visualization , human–computer interaction , algorithm , data mining
Abstract Overloaded orthogonal drawing (OOD) is a recent graph visualization style specifically conceived for directed graphs. It merges the advantages of some popular drawing conventions like layered drawings and orthogonal drawings, and provides additional support for some common analysis tasks. We present a visualization framework called DAGView , which implements algorithms and graphical features for the OOD style. Besides the algorithm for acyclic digraphs, the DAGView framework implements extensions to visualize both digraphs with cycles and undirected graphs, with the additional possibility of taking into account user preferences and constraints. It also supports an interactive visualization of clustered digraphs, based on the use of strongly connected components. Moreover, we describe an experimental user study, aimed to investigate the usability of OOD within the DAGView framework. The results of our study suggest that OOD can be effectively exploited to perform some basic tasks of analysis in a faster and more accurate way when compared to other drawing styles for directed graphs.