VISUALIZING NETWORK DATA

Networks are critical to modern society, and a thorough understanding of how they behave is crucial to their efficient operation. Fortunatel y, data on networks is plentiful; by visualizing this data, it is poss ible to greatly improve our understanding. Our focus is on visualizing the data associated with a network and not on simply visualizing the structure of the network itself. We begin with three static network di splays; two of these use geographical relationships, while the third i s a matrix arrangement that gives equal emphasis to all network links. Static displays can be swamped with large amounts of data; hence we i ntroduce direct-manipulation techniques that permit the graphs to cont inue to reveal relationships in the context of much more data. In effe ct, the static displays are parameterized so that interesting views ma y easily be discovered interactively. The software to carry out this n etwork visualization is called SeeNet.