Visualizing network data

Networks are critical to modern society, and a thorough understanding of how they behave is crucial to their emcient operation. Fortunately, data on networks is plentiful; by visualizing this data, it is possible to greatly improve our understanding. Our focus is on visualizing the data assodated with a network and not on simply visualizing the structure of the network itself. We begin with three static network displays; two of these use geographical relationships, while the third is a matrix arrangement that gives equal emphasis to all network links. Static displays can be swamped with large amounts of data; hence we introduce direct-manipulation techniques that permit the graphs to continue to reveal relationships in the context of much more data. In effect, the static displays are parameterized so that interesting views may easily be discovered interactively. The software to carry out this network visualization is called W e t .