Quad general tree drawing algorithm and general trees characterization: towards an environment for the experimental study on general tree drawing algorithms

Information visualization produces (interactive) visual representations of abstract data to reinforce human cognition and perception; thus enabling the viewer to gain knowledge about the internal structure of the data and causal relationships in it. The visualization of information hierarchies is concerned with the presentation of abstract hierarchical information about relationships between various entities. It has many applications in diverse domains such as software engineering, information systems, biology, and chemistry. Information hierarchies are typically modeled by an abstract tree, where vertices are entities and edges represent relationships between entities. The aim of visualizing tree drawings is to automatically produce drawings of trees which clearly reflect the relationships of the information hierarchy. This thesis is primarily concerned with introducing the new general tree drawing algorithm Quad that produces good visually distinguishable angles, and a characterization of general trees which allows us to classify general trees into several types based on their characteristics. Both of these topics are part of building an experimental study environment for the evaluation of drawing algorithms for general trees. The main achievements of this thesis include: 1. A study on characterization of general trees that aims to classify them into several types. 2. A tree drawing algorithm that produces visually distinguishable angles for high degree general trees with user specified angular coefficient

Interactive visualization of information hierarchies and applications on the web

The visualization of information hierarchies is concerned with the presentation of abstract hierarchical information about relationships between various entities. It has many applications in diverse domains such as software engineering, information systems, biology, and chemistry. Information hierarchies are typically modeled by an abstract tree, where vertices are entities and edges represent relationships between entities. The aim of visualizing tree drawings is to automatically produce drawings of trees which clearly reflect the relationships of the information hierarchy. This thesis is primarily concerned with problems related to the automatic generation of area-efficient grid drawings of trees, interactively visualizing information hierarchies, and applying our techniques on Web data. The main achievements of this thesis include: 1. An experimental study on algorithms that produce planar straight-line grid drawings of binary trees, 2. An experimental study that shows the algorithm for producing planar straight-line grid drawings of degree-d trees with n nodes with optimal linear area and with user-defined arbitrary aspect ratio, works well in practice, 3. A rings-based technique for interactively visualizing information hierarchies, in real-time, 4. A survey of Web visualization systems developed to address the lost in cyberspace problem, 5. A separation-based Web visualization system that we present as a viable solution to the lost in cyberspace problem, 6. A rings-based Web visualization system that we propose as a solution to the lost in cyberspace problem

Area-Efficient Drawings of Outer-1-Planar Graphs

We study area-efficient drawings of planar graphs: embeddings of graphs on an integer grid so that the bounding box of the drawing is minimized. Our focus is on the class of outer-1-planar graphs: the family of planar graphs that can be drawn on the plane with all vertices on the outer-face so that each edge is crossed at most once. We first present two straight-line drawing algorithms that yield small-area straight-line drawings for the subclass of complete outer-1-planar graphs. Further, we give an algorithm that produces an orthogonal drawing of any outer-1-plane graph in O(n log n) area while keeping the number of bends per edge relatively small

Linear area upward drawings of AVL trees

We prove that any AVL tree admits a linear-area straight-line strictly-upward planar grid drawing, that is, a drawing in which (a) each edge is mapped into a single straight-line segment, (b) each node is placed below its parent, (c) no two edges intersect, and (d) each node is mapped into a point with integer coordinates