08191 Executive Summary – Graph Drawing with Applications to Bioinformatics and Social Sciences

Abstract

Graph drawing deals with the problem of communicating the structure of
relational data through diagrams, or drawings. The ability to represent 
relational information in a graphical form is a powerful tool which allows 
to perform analysis through visual exploration to find important patterns, 
trends, and correlations. Real-world applications such as bioinformatics and 
sociology pose challenges to the relational visualization because, e.g., semantic
information carried by the diagram has to be used for obtaining meaningful layouts and
application-specific drawing conventions need to be fulfilled. Moreover, the
underlying data often stems from huge data bases, but only a small fraction
shall be displayed at a time; the user interactively selects the data to be
displayed and explores the graph by expanding interesting and collapsing
irrelevant parts. This requires powerful graph exploration tools with
navigation capabilities that allow dynamic adaption of the graph layout in real
time. In this seminar we focused on the application of graph drawing in two
important application domains: bioinformatics and social sciences. 
We brought together theoreticians and practitioners from these areas
and focused on problems concerning interaction with and navigation in large 
and dynamic networks arising in these application areas;
During the seminar, we identified and defined open graph drawing problems 
that are motivated by practical applications in the targeted application areas,
tackled selected open problems, formulated the findings as a first step to 
the solution, and defined further research directions.