Recent Large Graph Visualization Tools : A Review

Abstract

Large graph visualization tools are important instruments for researchers to understand large graph data sets. Currently there are many tools available for download and use under free license,others in research papers or journals, each with its own functionalities and capabilities. This review focuses on giving an introduction to those large graph visualization tools and emphasizes their advantages over other tools. Criteria for selection of the tools being reviewed are it was recently published (2009 or later), or a new version was released during the last two years. The tools being reviewed in this paper are igraph, Gephi, Cytoscape, Tulip, WiGis, CGV, VisANT, Pajek, In Situ Framework, Honeycomb and two visualization toolkits which are JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit and GraphGL. The last part of the review presents our suggestion on building large graph visualization platform based on advantages of tools and toolkits that are being reviewed.