Layering technique for visualizing social networks under force directed placement

Network Visualization is the translation of huge relationship data into a visualized form. It is a combined result of areas under mathematics and computer science. Network Visualization is actually a wide area having so many applications that includes social network analysis, cartography, military defense areas and bioinformatics. Among all these fields, social network visualization is gaining the attention of researchers because of its higher spreading ratio and complexity. Many researchers had given their own contributions in structuring a layout for visualizing the networks. Still there are areas for further advancements. In social network visualization, the actors are represented as nodes and the relationship among actors are represented as edges. For better visualization, an efficient placement algorithm is to be selected. In this paper, force directed placement technique is used for placing the nodes and edges inside the frame. The behavior of the huge datasets may sometimes lead into a situation that the number of nodes may exceed the number of pixels available in a plotting surface. To overcome this problem, the hierarchical structure of social networks can be grouped into various layers. Each layer corresponds to the depth of the network. Layering concept is introduced here which plot the data in a very effective manner.