A space of layout styles for hierarchical graph models of software systems

Hierarchical graphs are widely used as models of the structure of software systems. A central problem in the visualization of hierarchical graphs is the computation of layouts, i.e. of positions of the nodes in two- or three-dimensional space. We derive requirements for graph layouts from various software analysis questions, and classify the required layouts along three dimensions: layouts with meaningful distances between single nodes vs. layouts with meaningful distances between groups of nodes, layouts reflecting adjacency vs. layouts reflecting hierarchy, and layouts that faithfully reflect the size of subgraphs vs. layouts where certain subgraphs are magnified. We present a fairly simple and theoretically validated energy model for computing such layouts.

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