We herewith present a program that implements the paper "Animated Exploration of Dynamic Graphs with Radial Layout" (IEEE InfoVis2001 Page(s): 43-50 by Ka-Ping Yee, Danyel Fisher, Rachna Dhamija, Marti Hearst).
We have implemented additional ideas and features not described in the paper but also left out some parts.

We use GTK+2, PyGTK and Python for our implementation.

The main program resides in infoviz.py; This file contains the whole source (except the plugin sources), which may sound a bit odd. However, at the time we wrote this we had 499 LOC for the whole program, so not too much for one file.

The paradigm we use is the Model View Controller (MVC) paradigm. The 'model' are the Node and Circle classes, that represent the data we visualize. The View is handled by the GUI class, the controller by the Controller class.

Speaking of the data, we have Nodes which are represented as dots. These Nodes live on one of the many concentrical Circles, and are interconneced by lines (see node_table). The creation of these Node, Circle and node_table objects is handled by a Plugin. We will not go into much detail here, you can assume that after loading the data via a Plugin, the cirle_list contains some Circles, each containing a set of Nodes which are interconnected by node_table.

In the GUI, these Nodes, Circles and links between nodes are drawn onto a drawing area - producing the "radar-like" look. The elements of the user interface are specified in GLADE, a GUI designer program that outputs XML. These XML files are parsed by pyGtk using libglade resulting in an instantiated window containing the specified widget given back.

The Controller object handles the real work - it updates the Nodes during animation ("reorder"). Therefore, you might want to take a look into the recursive reorder() method and the draw() method of the GUI class for a start -- and just get a quick sense of how this all works.

The Plugins reside in the 'plugins' directory and are parsed dynamically at runtime. The plugin names get added into the submenu "Plugins" in the interface. There you can select one, which brings up its GUI in the lower-right corner of the window by calling its main entry point init(widget, controller) in setup.py. From there one can usually select a file containing the data that should get visualisized and start the visualization.

By clicking at a node the node animated moves radially to the middle. By toggling the 'Demo Mode' checkbox a random node gets continuously selected resulting in a fluent animation (which btw. looks cool and fancy and gets really entertaining if used with the right background music. it then also qualifies as really cool screensaver ;)).

• implements a radial layout on concentric circles
• everything is parametrizable from a neat GUI
• implements angular interpolation of the nodes (instead of linear)
• implements chromadepth
• implements "fisheye" circles
• demo mode
• plug-in architecture for different kinds of input data

  Currently the following plug-ins are available:

  • Filesystem: shows the directory structure from a selected path
  • Makefile: shows the Makefile dependencies of a given Makefile
  • Orgchart: reads in an XML file of an OrgChart structure

• InfooViz v0.2 (infoviz-0.2.tar.gz)

Animation Click here to view a GIF animation of infooviz.

The main program window after starting.

Using an XML file as input data.
Note the Chromadepth colors, which give a 3D impression of the graph.

The directory structure of the "windows/system32/" directory.

Showing dependencies of a makefile.
Note that the radius of the circles increases non-linearily, which gives the impression of a Focus-and-Context-like "Fisheye".