A New Approach to GraphMaps, a System Browsing Large Graphs as Interactive Maps

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new algorithmic framework for constructing GraphMaps, a system for visualizing large graphs as interactive maps, addressing challenges like zoom level management and node distribution.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel algorithmic framework for creating GraphMaps from meshes, including a competition mesh and node assignment techniques to improve visualization and user experience.

Findings

Developed a simple, low-dilation competition mesh with high angular resolution.

Created an algorithm to assign nodes to zoom levels, minimizing visible node changes during zoom.

Proposed new node selection techniques to enhance graph exploration.

Abstract

A GraphMaps is a system that visualizes a graph using zoom levels, which is similar to a geographic map visualization. GraphMaps reveals the structural properties of the graph and enables users to explore the graph in a natural way by using the standard zoom and pan operations. The available implementation of GraphMaps faces many challenges such as the number of zoom levels may be large, nodes may be unevenly distributed to different levels, shared edges may create ambiguity due to the selection of multiple nodes. In this paper, we develop an algorithmic framework to construct GraphMaps from any given mesh (generated from a 2D point set), and for any given number of zoom levels. We demonstrate our approach introducing competition mesh, which is simple to construct, has a low dilation and high angular resolution. We present an algorithm for assigning nodes to zoom levels that minimizes the change in the number of nodes on visible on the screen while the user zooms in and out between the levels. We think that keeping this change small facilitates smooth browsing of the graph. We also propose new node selection techniques to cope with some of the challenges of the GraphMaps approach.