Visualizing big graphs with labels through edge bundling

Graphs depicted as node-link diagrams are widely used in visualizing relational data sets. Visual clutter becomes problematic with big node-link diagrams. Researchers have recently proposed various approaches to bundling edges to reduce visual clutter. None of the edge bundling approaches, however, addresses the issue of labeling in the visualized graph. This paper presents an approach to bundling edges of big graphs, possibly over geographical maps with location labels such as cities and states. Our approach routes edges via flexible control points to leave space for labels to be clearly visible. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on two commonly used datasets.