Quilts: Matrix-Based Visualization of Layered Graphs

We encounter layered graphs in our daily lives as diagrams showing family trees, single-elimination sports tournaments (e.g. the NCAA bracket), and organizational structure. In today's corporate data sets, these graphs are often so large that traditional node-link depictions of them are unintelligible. Quilts are a new and much more scalable representation for layered graphs based on matrices. Below we describe quilts and a few other matrix-based representations. This project is a collaboration with the SAS Institute.

Principal Investigators: Ben Watson (NCSU CSC), Matt Stallmann (NCSU CSC), Ravi Devarajan (SAS).

Other project members: Matt Rakow (NCSU CSC), David Crist (NCSU CSC), Theresa-Marie Rhyne (NCSU CSC & RENCI), David Brink (SAS), Himesh Patel (SAS).

Sponsors: NSF Career award 0093172

Thanks to: RENCI and the Center for Visualization and Analytics.

Publications

B.A. Watson, D. Brink, M. Stallman, R. Devajaran, Rakow, M., T.-M. Rhyne & H. Patel. (2008). Matrix depictions for large layered graphs. North Carolina State U., Dept. Computer Science, Technical report TR-2008-17. Under review at IEEE TVCG. (pdf)

B.A. Watson, D. Brink, M. Stallmann, R. Devarajan, M. Rakow, T.-M. Rhyne & H. Patel. (2007). Visualizing very large layered graphs with quilts. IEEE Information Visualization Conference Poster. (pdf)

B.A. Watson, D. Brink, M. Stallmann, R. Devarajan, M. Rakow, T.-M. Rhyne & H. Patel. (2007). Visualizing very large layered graphs with quilts. IEEE Information Visualization Conference Interactive Demo. (pdf)

B.A. Watson, D. Brink, M. Stallman, R. Devajaran, T.-M. Rhyne & H. Patel. (2007). Visualizing very large layered graphs with quilts. North Carolina State U., Dept. Computer Science, Technical report TR-2008-10. (pdf)

Imagery

	Reading quilts Following a path through corresponding node-link and quilt depictions.
	Quilt scalability The quilt depiction is more legible than the node-link depiction.
	Limits of quilt scalability Here the quilt depiction is still more legible than the node-link depiction, but it'd be difficult to follow paths through the quilt.