[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] Indexes: Main | Date | Thread | Author

Re: [ba-ohs-talk] spring and force directed graphs


Chris,
Check out http://www.ontologystream.com/SLIP/index3.htm
Sandy    (01)

> From: <cdent@burningchrome.com>
> Reply-To: ba-ohs-talk@bootstrap.org
> Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 12:48:32 -0500 (EST)
> To: <ba-ohs-talk@bootstrap.org>
> Subject: [ba-ohs-talk] spring and force directed graphs
> Resent-From: <klausner@cubicon.com>
> Resent-To: s.klausner@attbi.com
> Resent-Date: Fri,  8 Mar 102 12:45:18 EDT
> 
> 
> This is somewhat related, since we've spent some time talking about
> graph visualizations.
> 
> I'm currently in a small graduate seminar on information
> visualization. It's a hybrid of playing with Java based tools and
> learning about perception and usability. Our final project is to work
> with faculty on either an interactive visualization project or
> improving the existing toolkit.
> 
> To my perception the toolkit is so broken at the moment that using it
> for a real project is pointless so I'm choosing the route of improving
> the existing toolkit.
> 
> There is a current implementation of the Spring algorithm for
> displaying document similarity matrices and other networks. It's not
> very featured, has a poor data representation, and is inefficient. It
> is being used to represent the similarity between documents discovered
> by latent semantic analysis. It only works for about 100 nodes or
> less.
> 
> I'm going to take on the task of making it better. Given the focus
> made on Touchgraph here, I'm assuming that the knowledge I gain will
> be helpful in my interactions with this group.
> 
> The constraints of this project require that I start from the
> existing codebase and not, instead, choose to extend something like
> Touchgraph. Unfortunately.
> 
> However I do think there is a lot of information that can be shared
> back and forth and that will be productive.
> 
> Can people point me to information that has been helpful in their own
> investigations of designing, programming and using algorithms for
> drawing graphs? I'm especially interested in:
> 
> - overviews of the reasoning used in designing these sorts of
> algorithms
> - design pointers for internal and external data representations of
> graphs. The current system does use XML for input, but the format is
> basically a wrapper around a matrix so does not represent node
> interconnections easily, nor cleany allow for additions of new
> nodes, or new attributes on nodes. I've seen and liked what
> Touchgraph for the Link Browser uses.
> - transmission formats
> - [important stuff I'm not thinking about at the moment]
> 
> What I'd like to have at the end of this is a system that allows for
> the display of similarity matrices and clustering in the same display.
> Clusters are displayed in the network and when selected can be zoomed
> for detail of  their contents.
> 
> This is more math than I know at the moment, but I guess I'll be
> picking it up.
> 
> Thanks for input.
> 
> -- 
> Chris Dent  <cdent@burningchrome.com>  http://www.burningchrome.com/~cdent/
> 
>     (02)