Graph Drawing Software (eng)

Automatic Graph Drawing is concerned with the layout of relational structures as they occur in Computer Science (Data Base Design, Data Mining, Web Mining), Bioinformatics (Metabolic Networks), Businessinformatics (Organization Diagrams, Event Driven Process Chains), or the Social Sciences (Social Networks).

In mathematical terms, such relational structures are modeled as graphs or more general objects such as hypergraphs, clustered graphs, or compound graphs. A variety of layout algorithms that are based on graph theoretical foundations have been developed in the last two decades and implemented in software systems.

After an introduction to the subject area and a concise treatment of the technical foundations for the subsequent chapters, this book features 14 chapters on state-of-the-art graph drawing software systems, ranging from general "tool boxes'' to customized software for various applications. These chapters are written by leading experts, they follow a uniform scheme and can be read independently from each other.

From the reviews:

"This very interesting volume presents fourteen different software packages devoted to find (aesthetically nice) drawings of large respectively huge graphs. ... All these packages are described by their developers who are all leading experts in the field of graph drawing. ... The volume ... can insistently be recommended to researchers in operations research (especially graph theory) and all practitioners who deal with large data sets and need to find relations between the data." (Stephan Dempe, OR News, Issue 25, 2005)

"The spacious layout of the text, interleaved with so many colourful figures, makes the book a pleasure to read. ... While it is clearly of interest to members of the graph drawing community, this book is in fact geared to potential users of the software tools in other areas ... . it definitely deserves a place on a library’s bookshelves as well as on the bookshelves of those who wish to enhance their teaching and research presentations with compelling depictions of graphs." (M Anjos, Journal of the Operational Research Society, Vol. 56 (5), 2005)