Graph Drawing - Application-specific Graph Drawings

Application-specific Graph Drawings

Graphs and graph drawings arising in other areas of application include

• Sociograms, drawings of a social network, as often offered by social network analysis software
• Hasse diagrams, a type of graph drawing specialized to partial orders
• Dessin d'enfants, a type of graph drawing used in algebraic geometry
• State diagrams, graphical representations of finite state machines
• Computer network diagrams, depictions of the nodes and connections in a computer network.
• Flow charts, drawings in which the nodes represent the steps of an algorithm and the edges represent control flow between steps.
• Data flow diagrams, drawings in which the nodes represent the components of an information system and the edges represent the movement of information from one component to another.

In addition, the placement and routing steps of electronic design automation are similar in many ways to graph drawing, and the graph drawing literature includes several results borrowed from the EDA literature. However, these problems also differ in several important ways: for instance, in EDA, area minimization and signal length are more important than aesthetics, and the routing problem in EDA may have more than two terminals per net while the analogous problem in graph drawing generally only involves pairs of vertices for each edge.