Visualization Research

Driven by a desire for a better understanding of the Internet, CAIDA develops new visualization techniques to display Internet data.

| Research Activities Publications Resources |

Visualizing the AS Core

Research Activities

Polar Coordinate Outdegree mapping - AS Core

Plotting the positions of Autonomous System (AS) nodes in polar coordinates allows a visualization of the dimensions of peering richness and geographic information, revealing the most highly connected Autonomous Systems. Visualizing the AS Core shows how ISPs connect to form the Internet backbone.

Geographic Influence Map

The Influence Map of DNS Root Anycast Servers shows the geographic distribution of DNS clients for anycast instances. Geographic data are shown on a pair of maps, both of which show the world as viewed from the North Pole. This technique shows the weighted center of a geographically distributed group with colored wedges indicating the number of group members in a given direction.

Diurnal and Geographical Animations - Cuttlefish

Cuttlefish simultaneously displays diurnal and geographical data patterns, illustrating the relationship between local time and the visualized events. The tool clearly depicts the time of day at a given geographic region by animating the sun's shadow moving across a world map.

3D Hyperbolic Geometry - Walrus

The Walrus tool uses 3D hyperbolic geometry to display graphs under a fisheye-like distortion, providing an interactive visualization of large directed graps in three-dimensional space. The amount of magnification, and thus the level of visible detail, varies across the display. This technique allows the user to examine the fine details of a small area while always having a view of the whole graph as a frame of reference.

Publications

Resources

Resources on graph drawing:

Graph Drawing. A starting point for graph drawing. It includes a bibliography and links to research groups, tools, conferences, and selected papers.
Graph Visualization and Navigation in Information Visualization. A survey paper on techniques for visualizing graphs, especially from the perspective of information visualization.
Fractal Approaches for Visualizing Huge Hierarchies. A paper discussing a fractal-based tree layout algorithm.
Layout Options for Large Internet Graphs