Bilkent University
Department of Computer Engineering
S E M I N A R

 

Customizable Web-Based Visualization of Relational Information

 

Selçuk Onur Sümer
MSc. Student
Computer Engineering Department
Bilkent University

To represent complex relational information, graphs are used commonly. In simple graphs, nodes are generally considered as uniform-sized components and nested node structures are not allowed. On the other hand, in compound graphs, nodes are considered as arbitrary-sized components and nested node structures are allowed. In many cases, simple graphs are not sufficient to visualize complex relationships, because relational information is often clustered or hierarchically organized into groups or nested structures.

Within the last decade, many graph visualization software have been developed. While some of them are domain specific, there are also some general purpose graph visualization tools. However, only a few of them support compound or clustered structures. Moreover, none of those web-based tools fully support compound or clustered structures. As a first step in this direction, we have started to collaborate with the CytoscapeWeb project which is an open source web-based graph visualization tool supported by some prestigious universities, research centers and companies. Our first contribution was compound graph support, which allows creating and interactively editing compound graphs as well as saving and loading in common graph formats such as GraphML and XGMML. We are also working on the integration of the CoSE (compound spring embedder) layout algorithm of Chisio project to CytoscapeWeb.

With the help of research results and experience obtained during the development of CytoscapeWeb, our main goal is to design and implement a web-based version of Chisio, a general purpose customizable graph visualization and layout tool. One of the most major aims of this project is to construct a general-purpose web-based graph visualization tool that can be easily customized for a specific domain by application developers.

 

DATE: 25 April, 2011, Monday @ 15:40
PLACE: EB103