Special Section: InfoVis 2004
Information Visualization (2005) 4, 114–135. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ivs.9500092
On the readability of graphs using node-link and matrix-based representations: a controlled experiment and statistical analysis
Mohammad Ghoniem1, Jean-Daniel Fekete2 and Philippe Castagliola3
- 1Ecole des Mines de Nantes, Nantes, Cedex 3, France
- 2INRIA Futurs/LRI, Bât 490, Université Paris-Sud, Orsay, Cedex, France
- 3IRCCyN/IUT de Nantes, Rue Christian Pauc – La Chantrerie, Nantes, Cedex 3, France
Correspondence: Mohammad Ghoniem, Ecole des Mines de Nantes, 4 rue Alfred Kastler. B.P.20722 44307 NANTES Cedex 3, France. Tel: +33 2 97 54 35 05; Fax: +33 2 51 85 82 49; E-mail: Mohammad.Ghoniem@emn.fr
Received 30 October 2004; Accepted 1 February 2005; Published online 12 May 2005.
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:
Visualization of graphs, adjacency matrices, node-link representation, readability, evaluation
