Nominal color coding is the aesthetic and functional use of color to convey
qualitative information in graphical environments. The specification of hi
gh-contrast color sets is a fundamental step in this process. We formulate
the color-coding problem here as a combinatorial optimization problem on gr
aphs and present an algorithm that performs well and does not require that
the function used to code the similarity between colors be a distance funct
ion. (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.