Rauch Manuela, Wozelka Ralph, Veas Eduardo Enrique, Sabol Vedran
2014
Graphs are widely used to represent relationshipsbetween entities. Indeed, their simplicity in depicting connect-edness backed by a mathematical formalism, make graphs anideal metaphor to convey relatedness between entities irrespec-tive of the domain. However, graphs pose several challenges forvisual analysis. A large number of entities or a densely con-nected set quickly render the graph unreadable due to clutter.Typed relationships leading to multigraphs cannot clearly berepresented in hierarchical layout or edge bundling, commonclutter reduction techniques. We propose a novel approach tovisual analysis of complex graphs based on two metaphors:semantic blossom and selective expansion. Instead of showingthe whole graph, we display only a small representative subsetof nodes, each with a compressed summary of relations in asemantic blossom. Users apply selective expansion to traversethe graph and discover the subset of interest. A preliminaryevaluation showed that our approach is intuitive and usefulfor graph exploration and provided insightful ideas for futureimprovements.