Flexible Layering in Hierarchical Drawings with Nodes of Arbitrary Size

Graph drawing is an important area of information visualization which concerns itself with the visualization of relational data structures. Relational data like networks, hierarchies, or database schemas can be modelled by graphs and represented visually using graph drawing algorithms. Most existing graph drawing algorithms do not consider the size of nodes when creating a drawing. In most real world applications, however, nodes contain information which has to be displayed and nodes thus need a specific area to display this information. The required area can vary significantly between different nodes in the same graph. In this paper we present an algorithm for the layering step of hierarchical graph drawing methods that is able to take the sizes of the nodes into account. It further allows the user to choose between compact drawings with many temporary (dummy) nodes and less compact drawings with fewer dummy nodes. A large number of dummy nodes can significantly increase the running time of the subsequent steps of hierarchical graph drawing methods.

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