Using graph grammar to implement global layout for a visual programming language generation system
VIP '01 Proceedings of the Pan-Sydney area workshop on Visual information processing - Volume 11
Tool-supported compression of UML class diagrams
UML'99 Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on The unified modeling language: beyond the standard
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For applications which generate diagrammatic representations automatic layout techniques are a crucial component. Since graph-like network diagrams are among the most commonly used and most important types of diagrammatic displays, layout techniques for graphs have been extensively studied. However, a problem with current graph layout methods which are capable of producing satisfactory results for a wide range of graphs is that they put an extremely high demand on computational resources.This paper introduces a new layout method that consumes only little computational resources and does not need any heavy-duty preprocessing. Unlike other declarative layout algorithms not even the costly repeated evaluation of an objective function is required. The method presented is based on a competitive learning algorithm which is an extension of self-organization strategies known from unsupervised neural networks.We describe the formal details of the layout algorithm as well as the intuition behind it and present experimental results and a comparison with other methods.