Pawel Gajer, Michael T. Goodrich, and Stephen G. Kobourov Pictures are a useful medium for communicating abstract information.
Pictures exploit our natural ability to quickly recognize and understand visual patterns.
The difference between an effective and a confusing presentation of the same data can be subtle, however, and often depends on the layout of the drawing. Today, the automatic generation of drawings of graphs finds many applications. We present a novel hierarchical force-directed method for drawing large graphs. The algorithm produces a graph embedding in an Euclidean space E of any dimension. Among the other notable features of our approach are the utilization of a maximal independent set filtration of the set of vertices of a graph, a fast energy function minimization strategy, efficient memory management, and an intelligent initial placement of vertices.