Graphviz

Arif Bilgin, John Ellson, Emden Gansner, Stephen North

Graphviz is a graph visualization system that contains tools, user interfaces, filters and libraries. One goal of this system is to automatically create concrete diagrams of abstract graphs and networks, whose quality approaches that of hand-made diagrams. Graphviz has been incorporated as a service in numerous systems for networking, security, software engineering and bioinformatics.

Information Visualization Research and AT&T Labs researcher Bill Cheswick collaborated with Lumeta Corp. and Matt Dresdner at Mercury Seattle to make artwork for an Internet map poster. Click on the image at the right to download the poster (3.2 meg PDF file).

Recent work in graphviz is at big networks: thousands, many tens or hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of objects. There are many applications whose solution involves rendering and interacting with networks of this size. In spring 2009 we expect to release sfdp for layout and a compatible OpenGL-based viewer named smyrna.

Graphviz has been applied to hundreds of projects. Source code and binary executables for common platforms are available. See graphviz.org for information.