A COGNITIVE APPROACH FOR GRAPH DRAWING

Abstract

The effectiveness of pictorial representations (or drawings) of directed graphs is widely recognized in various fields such as system science and information science, where criteria from human visual cognition are important to evaluate the quality of drawings. This paper is devoted to consider automatic methods for drawing a finite, labeled and directed graph from a cognitive viewpoint. First, a fundamental view of this problem is presented and requirements for drawings are identified. Then the whole algorithm to realize the requirements is outlined, which consists of five steps. The first step is a preparatory one and the fourth and fifth steps have been published in other literature. Newly developed algorithms for the second and third steps are detailed and several applications also are shown.