Graphs in Software Visualization

摘要

In his survey paper, Koschke states that the software visualization and the graph drawing communities are almost disjoint and that a collaboration of both communities would be desirable. The list of the most heavily used graph drawing tools in this survey contains obsolete tools that are not even maintained anymore, and does not contain new software that addresses some of the needs of the software visualization community. As pointed out above, the needs of the software visualization community in terms of graph drawing tools are, at least partially, a subject of active investigation in the graph drawing community, and indeed, there are tools for problems such as drawing large graphs, interactive drawing, or drawing UML diagrams. In the Dagstuhl meeting, ideas have been born to bring together the new XML-based graph exchange format GraphML currently being developed in the graph drawing community and the GXL format designed for software engineering. (GXL will be discussed in this chapter.) The ideas have been followed up by a discussion at the International Graph Drawing Symposium 2001 in Vienna. We hope that the two formats will merge into one. The Dagstuhl conference was a promising first step in bringing the two communities together, and hopefully, the articles in this chapter of the proceedings will enhance the collaboration. For further reading, we suggest one of the books on graph drawing and the yearly proceedings of the International Symposium on graph drawing, e.g., [41,43].