Interactive Visual Exploration of Large Bipartite Node-Link Diagrams (DAEV)

In this thesis, we introduce a web-based, interactive exploration interface for a broad audience to investigate large, weighted, bipartite graphs. Current interactive exploration tools use complex visualizations because they were developed for domain experts. However, often datasets are also of interest to lay users.

Therefore, we implemented a web application, which is accessible to a broad audience. Moreover, we conducted systematic benchmarks to compare state-of-the-art web-based rendering techniques. Furthermore, we compared the performance of different libraries to determine the most efficient rendering solution and current limitations of web-based rendering.

We introduce the concept of Firework Plots, which aims to provide an intuitive visualization that scales well with the size of the data. Our visualization concept is a combination of intuitive visualization and interaction concepts, like node-link diagrams, hierarchical aggregation, constrained force-based layouts and seamless zoom. We show the usefulness of our implementation by discussing different use cases and comparing it to related work. Moreover, we conducted multiple benchmarks to show the influence of our implementation on the interactive scalability.