Graphs are data models, which are widely used in many areas from networking to biology to computer science. Visualization, interactive editing ability and layout of graphs are critical issues at the point of analysis of the underlying relational information. There are several commercial and non-commercial graph visualization tools and it is quite noticeable that commercial tools have higher capabilities and better user interfaces than non-commercial or academic tools. Overall support for compound or hierarchical graph representations is very limited if provided at all. Here we present a new graph visualization tool with compound graph support, named Chisio. Chisio is developed as a free, easy-to-use and powerful academic graph visualization tool supporting various automatic layout algorithms. It is based on Eclipse’s Graphical Editing Framework (GEF), which is open source and freely available. The tool offers several layout styles including the classical spring embedder and hierarchical (Sugiyama) layout. It also showcases a recent spring-based compound graph layout (CoSE) developed by our group. Furthermore, Chisio supports visualization of clustering information of graphs, and a new style for layout of such graphs.

DATE: 16 April, 2007, Monday@ 16:40
PLACE: EA 409