Project Plan (LW, DA)

Topic:

The topic that we plan to explore in this project is how to compare multiple network visualizations. While techniques to address this issue have a wide variety of potential applications, there is not a substantial amount of existing literature directly addressing this problem. Thus far, we have a few potential ideas for implementation, but plan to elaborate on these and develop others over the course of the project.

Desired Outcomes:

The outcome of this project will be the implementation of multiple proposed solutions to the network comparison problem. Because of time limitations and lack of existing solutions for guidance, we will likely simplify the problem set to series of small networks. The details of the implementation, such as language and development package, have yet to be decided.

From this project, we hope to gain a better understanding of graph embeddings and techniques for improving readability as it applies to graph comparison. As we’ve seen, graph and network style visualizations are very common in practice. We hope to better understand how techniques that we’ve covered in class can help to create better means of comparison.

Reading List:

Graham and Kennedy. Exploring Multiple Trees through DAG Representations. IEEE InfoVis, 2007.

Frishman, Y. & Tal, A. Online Dynamic Graph Drawing IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2008.

Frishman, Y. & Tal, A. Dynamic Drawing of Clustered Graphs Proc. IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, 2004.

C. Collberg, S. Kobourov, J. Nagra, J. Pitts, and K.Wampler. A system for graph-based visualization of the evolution of software. In SoftVis ’03: Proceedings of the 2003 ACM symposium on Software visualization, 2003.

Ogata et al. A heuristic graph comparison algorithm and its application to detect functionally related enzyme clusters. Oxford University Press, 2000.

Hoebe and Bosma. Visualizing multiple network perspectives. ACM, 2004.

Major Layout Algorithms. http://www.yworks.com/products/yfiles/doc/developers-guide/major_layouters.html

Erten et al. Simultaneous Graph Drawing: Layout Algorithms and Visualization Schemes.

Time Table:

• • Week 1:
    • Develop Project Plan
    • Compile Initial Reading List
    • Begin readings

• • Week 2:
    • Complete readings
    • Brainstorm potential solutions
    • Select most promising solutions
    • Select implementation language/package
    • Create initial data set
      
  • Week 3:
    • Implement solutions
    • Test over additional data sets
      
  • Week 4:
    • Prepare report and presentation
      

Output & Data Sources:

We hope to implement several solutions to the network comparison problem. The data sources used for this visualization will likely be small, derived data sets. Hopefully there will be potential to apply our solutions to real-world data sets. However, since the purpose of this project is for exploration of general technique, integrating real-world data visualization is not currently part of the project plan.