Visualizing graphs – a generalized view

The visualization of graphs has proven to be very useful for exploring structures in different application domains. However, in certain fields of computer science, graph visu-alization is understood and focused quite differently. While ”graph drawing ” focuses on optimized layouts for node-link-representations of networks, ”information visualiza-tion ” prefers to work on hierarchies focusing on very large structures, different views and interactivity. This paper gives a systematic view of the problem of graph visualization by combining both approaches. We will introduce a general view of different visualization methods as well as describe occurring problems and dis-cuss basic constraints. These will be used to propose a vi-sualization framework for graphs, whose development mo-tivated this paper