Automatic Graph Drawing Automatic Graph Drawing A graph is a mathematical structure that is widely used to describe the relationships between different objects. The objects are called the nodes of the graph and the relationships are called edges .
Every edge connects two nodes.
One example for a structure that can be described as a graph are relationships between people. Graph drawing is the art to draw a graph in such a way that the relationships between the objects are easily understood by looking at the picture. The nodes are usually drawn as circles or rectangles while the edges are drawn as curves connecting two of these shapes. The goal of automatic graph drawing is to develop algorithms that compute a good drawing automatically. Since an exact definition of a good drawing is needed for this purpose, the graph drawing community has developed objective criteria to measure the quality of a drawing.