TopoLayout-DG: A Topological Feature-Based Framework for Visualizing Inside Behavior of Large Directed Graphs

Directed graphs are a useful model of many computational systems including software, hardware, fault trees, and of course the Internet. We present the TopoLayout-DG framework, an extension to the original TopoLayout algorithm, for visualizing the inside behaviour of large directed graphs. The proposed framework consists of: a feature-based multi-level algorithm, called ToF2DG, that detects topological features in large directed graphs in a hierarchical fashion; and visualization methods for the resulting levels of details of the graph’s topological structure. In this work-in-progress paper, we highlight the main steps of the proposed ToF2DG algorithm. Moreover, we show some preliminary visual representations of artificial directed graphs. These preliminary representations indicate that the framework promises to solve some scalability issues in the visualisation of large directed graphs.