A Comparison of the Readability of Graphs Using Node-Link and Matrix-Based Representations

• Published in: IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization pp. 17 - 24
• Main Authors: Ghoniem, M., Fekete, J.-D., Castagliola, P.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway NJ IEEE 01-01-2004
• Subjects: adjacency matrices; Applied sciences; Computer displays; Computer graphics; Computer science; control theory; systems; Computer systems and distributed systems. User interface; evaluation; Exact sciences and technology; Image generation; Layout; node-link representation; readability; Software; Taxonomy; User interfaces; Visualization; Visualization of graphs; Taxonomy; Data visualization; Shortest path; Routing; Graph theory; Legibility; Recommendation
• ISBN: 0780387793; 0780387791; 9780780387799
• ISSN: 1522-404X
• DOI: 10.1109/INFVIS.2004.1

In this paper, we describe a taxonomy of generic graph related tasks and an evaluation aiming at assessing the readability of two representations of graphs: matrix-based representations and node-link diagrams. This evaluation bears on seven generic tasks and leads to important recommendations with regard to the representation of graphs according to their size and density. For instance, we show that when graphs are bigger than twenty vertices, the matrix-based visualization performs better than node-link diagrams on most tasks. Only path finding is consistently in favor of node-link diagrams throughout the evaluation