TabularVis: An Interactive Relationship Visualization Tool Supported by Optimization and Search Algorithms

• Published in: Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications Vol. 997; pp. 167 - 192
• Main Authors: Papp, György, Kunkli, Roland
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2019; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Communications in Computer and Information Science
• Subjects: Circular layout; Data visualization; Diagram; Hierarchical edge bundling; Search algorithm; Sorting; Table
• ISBN: 9783030267551; 3030267555
• ISSN: 1865-0929; 1865-0937
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-26756-8_8

Visualizing relationships is becoming more and more essential nowadays, so we need efficient visualization solutions to meet the requirements of the users. One of its forms is when we use tables to describe the relationships and their associated values. In this work, we present TabularVis, an interactive, web client based application for visualizing relationships based on tabular data. Our visualization technique was inspired by the Table Viewer web application of the popular genome visualization software called Circos. For our solution, we only kept its central idea, and we built our new extensions and features around it. We also propose an automatic sorting solution to reduce the number of intersections in the diagram along with an edge bundling technique to improve the clarity of it. In the paper, we present the features of our visualization, which mainly focuses on improving the readability of the diagram in those cases when the difference between the values of the table is extremely small or large. Also, we compared our solution with Circos in a survey to prove the effectiveness of our proposed features. Beside this, we compared the sorting method with the edge bundling technique as well to confirm their performance. The result of the surveys is also presented in the paper. Furthermore, we provide running time measurements as well to show the effectiveness of the presented methods.