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the perspective of large scale software design, the use
of generic, reusable and extensible modules are crite-
ria of capital importance, which our method allows to
satisfy.
Although the method presented here produces
good results, further experiments are required to val-
idate it for larger graphs, as well as to analyze its
applicability when different types of constraints are
combined together. The quality of the results is
highly impacted by the quality of the output provided
by the heuristic methods used in the crossing mini-
mization step. This imposes further research on us-
ing this method in combination with other types of
approaches and visualization techniques, like those
presented in (Burch and Diehl, 2008; Burch et al.,
2010) for the visualization of time-varying compound
graphs. Interesting is also the work of (Shen et al.,
2006), as well as the approach presented in (Muelder
and Ma, 2008), which combines clustering techniques
and tree-maps for fast layout computation of large
graphs. Another important direction for future re-
search is related to the non-discriminative applica-
tion of crossing algorithms. The embedding of all
relations and constraints into a unique graph makes
it impossible to discriminate edge and node types
(constraint, hierarchy, relation, etc.). When no zero-
crossing solutions exist, it is impossible for current
crossing minimization algorithms to distinguish be-
tween ‘favorable’ and ‘unwanted’ crossings. For
example, the end-user may specify that she prefers
crossings in the hierarchy rather than in the linear pro-
cesses she visualizes. Hence, the design of algorithms
that can prioritize crossings according to the edge and
node types is an important next step to consider.
Heterogeneous graph drawing, in general, is a
topic rich in challenges where many problems remain
to be addressed. These range from the user experi-
ence domain (e.g. adequate layout criteria and ‘coher-
ent’ visual representations), the management of zoom
in/out approaches following several criteria, to the in-
teractivity with respect to the visible subset of rela-
tions themselves.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The work presented here was developed in the context
of the ARSA project (Analyse des R´eseaux Sociaux
pour Administrations), partially funded by the French
DGCIS (Direction G´en´erale de la Comp´etitivit´e, de
l’Industrie et des Services). The author wishes to
thank our end-user, the City Administration of An-
tibes, with a special mention to our contact, Patrick
Duverger.
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