Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Layout For Visualizing Large Software Structures In 3d, Colin Ware, Glenn Franck, Monica Parkhi, Tim Dudley

Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping

There is increasing evidence that 3D visualization of complex structures has advantages over 2D visualization. While nested directed graphs are an important method of representing information in 2D or 3D, they must be effectively organized in order to be understood. Most work on graph layout has assumed that fully automatic layout is desirable. Through our work with graphs representing large software structures, we have found that, due to the importance of the semantic content, it is necessary to combine automatic layout with manual layout. This paper describes a system called GraphVisualizer3D, which was designed to help people understand large nested …