Graph Thumbnails: Identifying and Comparing Multiple Graphs at a Glance

Vahan Yoghourdjian; Tim Dwyer; Karsten Klein; Kimbal Marriott; Michael Wybrow

doi:10.1109/TVCG.2018.2790961

Graph Thumbnails: Identifying and Comparing Multiple Graphs at a Glance

Vahan Yoghourdjian, Tim Dwyer, Karsten Klein, Kimbal Marriott, Michael Wybrow

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Research › peer-review

28 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

We propose Graph Thumbnails, small icon-like visualisations of the high-level structure of network data. Graph Thumbnails are designed to be legible in small multiples to support rapid browsing within large graph corpora. Compared to existing graph-visualisation techniques our representation has several advantages: (1) the visualisation can be computed in linear time; (2) it is canonical in the sense that isomorphic graphs will always have identical thumbnails; and (3) it provides precise information about the graph structure. We report the results of two user studies. The first study compares Graph Thumbnails to node-link and matrix views for identifying similar graphs. The second study investigates the comprehensibility of the different representations. We demonstrate the usefulness of this representation for summarising the evolution of protein-protein interaction networks across a range of species.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	1-14
Number of pages	14
Journal	IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Volume	14
Issue number	18
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2018.2790961
Publication status	Published - 2018

Keywords

circle packing
k-connected
k-core decomposition
large networks
network identification
network visualisation

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10.1109/TVCG.2018.2790961

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abstract = "We propose Graph Thumbnails, small icon-like visualisations of the high-level structure of network data. Graph Thumbnails are designed to be legible in small multiples to support rapid browsing within large graph corpora. Compared to existing graph-visualisation techniques our representation has several advantages: (1) the visualisation can be computed in linear time; (2) it is canonical in the sense that isomorphic graphs will always have identical thumbnails; and (3) it provides precise information about the graph structure. We report the results of two user studies. The first study compares Graph Thumbnails to node-link and matrix views for identifying similar graphs. The second study investigates the comprehensibility of the different representations. We demonstrate the usefulness of this representation for summarising the evolution of protein-protein interaction networks across a range of species.",

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AU - Yoghourdjian, Vahan

AU - Dwyer, Tim

AU - Klein, Karsten

AU - Marriott, Kimbal

AU - Wybrow, Michael

PY - 2018

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Graph Thumbnails: Identifying and Comparing Multiple Graphs at a Glance

Abstract

Keywords

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