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Special Issue on Selected Papers from the Eleventh International Symposium on Graph Drawing, GD 2003
DOI: 10.7155/jgaa.00099
Confluent Drawings: Visualizing Non-planar Diagrams in a Planar Way
Vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 31-52, 2005. Regular paper.
Abstract We introduce a new approach for drawing diagrams.
Our approach is to use a technique we call confluent drawing
for visualizing non-planar graphs in a planar way. This approach
allows us to draw, in a crossing-free manner, graphs-such as
software interaction diagrams-that would normally have many
crossings. The main idea of this approach is quite simple: we allow
groups of edges to be merged together and drawn as "tracks"
(similar to train tracks). Producing such confluent drawings
automatically from a graph with many crossings is quite challenging,
however, we offer a heuristic algorithm
(one version for undirected graphs and one version for directed ones)
to test if a
non-planar graph can be drawn efficiently in a confluent way. In
addition, we identify several large classes of graphs that can be
completely categorized as being either confluently drawable or
confluently non-drawable.
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