Best GUI concept to edit/manage large acyclic graphs

Question

The point is to enable fast and intuitive management of potentially large graph structures

Concepts I've come across are:

• Tree
• TreeMap
• Venn diagram
• Hyperbolic tree

Which one would you prefer or other ideas?

Answer 1

Best practical UI solution I have come across for large graphs is Mark Shepherd's spring graph. It scales quite well too.

Answer 2

You might want to take a look at GUESS which has some nice rapid prototyping features like an integrated domain specific language for graph manipulation/generation and includes a variety of graph layouts. Which means you can easily hack a demo and check if you like the interface.

http://graphexploration.cond.org/

Answer 3

skyrails is an interesting concept; editing would be done by its command line rather than direct manipulation. The implementation currently handles 10^4 nodes, which isn't a large graph by the normal measure (large graphs now-a-days means you can't fit them easily into 32 bit memory), but the concept exploits innate human 3D navigation skills, so should scale to as large as we can cope with.

Answer 4

Here some clever ideas for different scales:

1. Zircle UI A real cool vuejs component, navigation feels a bit like zooming through mandelbrot fractals. atm limited by six levels.
2. Tree Browser with D3 Smart solution by TU Graz. Not sure about licensing impact, but looks really promising.
3. gephi This will be used by data journalist to show very large plots, but is not the most interactive solution.
4. yed/yworks Very experienced company with a wide range of awesome diagramming solutions
5. GraphQLViz Space Hot Rod for Graphviz.

Why not using a mindmap solution? There are soo many cool out there. For e.g.

1. mindmeister Great Web-Solution, where you can easy share your work like a google document.
2. simplemind As App or PC. My personal fav esp on my handy. There is also a free edition.
3. freemind OpenSource with different forkes, a lot of plugins and a groovy-DSL