Graph layout

Graph drawing is an area of mathematics and computer science combining methods from geometric graph theory and information visualization to derive two-dimensional depictions of graphs arising from applications such as social network analysis, cartography, linguistics, and bioinformatics.

A drawing of a graph or network diagram is a pictorial representation of the vertices and edges of a graph. This drawing should not be confused with the graph itself: very different layouts can correspond to the same graph. In the abstract, all that matters is which pairs of vertices are connected by edges. In the concrete, however, the arrangement of these vertices and edges within a drawing affects its understandability, usability, fabrication cost, and aesthetics. The problem gets worse, if the graph changes over time by adding and deleting edges (dynamic graph drawing) and the goal is to preserve the user's mental map.

Graphs are frequently drawn as node-link diagrams in which the vertices are represented as disks, boxes, or textual labels and the edges are represented as line segments, polylines, or curves in the Euclidean plane. Node-link diagrams can be traced back to the 13th century work of Ramon Llull, who drew diagrams of this type for complete graphs in order to analyze all pairwise combinations among sets of metaphysical concepts.

In the case of directed graphs, arrowheads form a commonly used graphical convention to show their orientation; however, user studies have shown that other conventions such as tapering provide this information more effectively.Upward planar drawing uses the convention that every edge is oriented from a lower vertex to a higher vertex, making arrowheads unnecessary.

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