A few weeks ago, we wrote a blog post about force-directed layouts. We took a brief look ‘under the hood’ at the forces at work each time the Standard Layout runs.
In this post, we’re going to look at the other KeyLines automatic layouts. Feel free to post questions at the end.
Structural Layout
This is actually KeyLines’ third ‘force-directed’ layout.
Instead of running the simulation of the three forces (repulsion, springs and energy) straight off, it first bunches nodes together according to the structure of the network, i.e. nodes connected with the same set of nodes are grouped:
Once the groups of nodes have been made, then the force-directed algorithm runs, but operating on the groups instead of on individual nodes.
This positions each group of structurally-similar nodes together, which helps to reveal the structural composition of the graph. A great way of finding node communities:
Hierarchy layout
The hierarchy layout takes a different approach from the force-directed layouts – one that will be familiar if you have seen a family tree.
Here the idea is to place nodes in a hierarchical tree structure, starting from a particular node or nodes – specified by the ‘top’ option.
The other nodes are placed in layers below the top node – the layer for each node is simply determined by how many links away it is from one of the top nodes.
Within each layer, the algorithm sorts the nodes into an order that tries to give a good-looking result, and adjusts their horizontal positions to fit the network structure.
The hierarchy layout can produce different orientations, but this simply involves rotating the top-down result as required.
The Radial Layout
Finally the radial layout is a variation on hierarchy.
It uses the same hierarchical structure, but instead of placing the layers in rows one after the other, it places them on concentric rings, with the ‘top’ nodes in the middle.
This can be a great alternative to the hierarchy layout if you have a lot of nodes in each ‘generation’:
Visualize your own connected data!
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