On the Readability of Graphs Using Node-Link and Matrix-Based Representations: A Controlled Experiment and Statistical Analysis
Information VisualizationPublished 12 May 2005
Mohammad Ghoniem, Jean‐Daniel Fekete, Philippe Castagliola
Citations325
SJR quartileQ3
SJR score0.30
SNIP1.00
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TL;DR
A taxonomy of generic graph related tasks along with a computer-based evaluation designed to assess the readability of two representations of graphs: matrix-based representations and node-link diagrams are described.
Abstract
In this article, we describe a taxonomy of generic graph related tasks along with a computer-based evaluation designed to assess the readability of two representations of graphs: matrix-based representations and node-link diagrams. This evaluation encompasses seven generic tasks and leads to insightful recommendations for the representation of graphs according to their size and density. Typically, we show that when graphs are bigger than twenty vertices, the matrix-based visualization outperforms node-link diagrams on most tasks. Only path finding is consistently in favor of node-link diagrams throughout the evaluation.
Keywords
Computer Science
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