JASPER: Just A new Space-filling and Pixel-oriented layout for large graph ovERview

Jason Vallet, Guy Melançon and Bruno Pinaud

Conference on Visualization and Data Analysis 2016, Part of IS&T Electronic Imaging (February 16-18, 2016)

This webpage contains supplementary material presenting additional visualisations obtained with JASPER.

Abstract

When analysing data and handling a visualisation, users mainly spend their cognitive resources making sense of the graphical representation and mapping it back to the data and domain. This task becomes even more critical when dealing with larger data sets. Therefore, a valuable visualisation design strategy is to couple graphical representations and user tasks to better support the sense making process. This paper focuses on a particular task where users must make sense of state changes occurring on nodes of a graph. To this end, we propose JASPER, a new layout algorithm focusing on the visualisation of nodes inspired from pixel-oriented layouts, relying on node clustering to identify and represent existing connections through spatial adjacency.

JASPER can layout moderate size graphs in real-time and is able to tackle large graphs with up to 2 million nodes and 5 million edges in reasonable time (about half a minute). Furthermore, although JASPER has been designed around a specific application, the underlying methodology can be employed to draw quick overviews of any type of graphs. The paper lays down the underlying principles of JASPER, and reports it performances (execution times) on increasingly large graphs. JASPER is then used and showcased to visualise network propagation phenomenon in large graphs.

Gallery

  • Simple random graph (256 nodes):

Displayed using a force-directed layout (FM3) and JASPER.

simple1 simple2

  • DBLP graph (317,080 nodes/1,049,866 edges):

Displayed using a force-directed layout (FM3) and JASPER.

dblp1 dblp2

  • Wiki-talk graph (2,394,385 nodes/5,021,410 edges):

Displayed using JASPER.

wiki2

  • com-LiveJournal graph (3,997,962 nodes/34,681,189 edges):

Displayed using JASPER.

live_journal

  • Propagation simulation on random small-world network (65k nodes/130k edges – download images):

SWgif

SW01 SW02 SW03 SW04 SW05 SW06 SW07 SW08 SW09 SW10 SW11 SW12 SW13 SW14 SW15 SW16 SW17 SW18 SW19 SW20 SW21

  • Propagation simulation on DBLP:

prop01 prop02 prop03 prop04 prop05 prop06 prop07 prop08 prop09 prop10 prop11 prop12 prop13 prop14 prop15 prop16 prop17 prop18 prop19 prop20 prop21 prop22 prop23 prop24