Partial Link Drawings for Nodes, Links, and Regions of Interest

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Partially drawn links in a radial layout

Partially drawn links in graph visualizations have been introduced as a concept for further reducing visual clutter caused by many link crossings in combination to a formerly applied layout algorithm focusing on aesthetic graph drawing criteria. Although this visualization strategy has been shown to be useful for a faster and more accurate visual exploration of node-link diagrams in some scenarios, it has not been integrated into a graph visualization tool as an interaction feature to this end. Apart from representing the entire displayed graph in the partially drawn link style we allow the viewer to apply this feature to several nodes, links, or regions of interest. To avoid possible ambiguities introduced by the disconnectedness of start and target nodes further interaction techniques can be applied to mitigate this situation by showing the complete link information for single selected vertices or edges again.