TourViz: Interactive visualization of connection pathways in large graphs

Abstract

We present TourViz, a system that helps its users to interactively visualize and make sense in large network datasets. In particular, it takes as input a set of nodes the user specifies as of interest and presents the user with a visualization of connection subgraphs around these input nodes. Each connection subgraph contains good pathways that highlight succinct connections among a "close-by" group of input nodes. TourViz combines visualization with rich user interaction to engage and help the user to further understand the relations among the nodes of interest,by exploring their neighborhood on demand as well as modifying the set of interest nodes. We demonstrate TourViz's usage and benefits using the DBLP graph, consisting of authors and their co-authorship relations, while our system is designed generally to work with any kind of graph data. We will invite the audience to experiment with our system and comment on its usability, usefulness, and how our system can help with their research and improve the understanding of data in other domains. © 2012 ACM.