Visual Graph Comparison

Researchers and analysts in many fields are sometimes confronted with the task of comparing and contrasting two similar but different graphs or networks. This paper presents a technique and prototype tool to support the visual comparison of graphs and the interactive reconciliation of candidate graphs into a single reference graph. Given two input graphs and a set of similarities between nodes, the Semantic Graph Visualiser (SGV) computes a merged graph and allows the analyst to visually compare and contrast the two input graphs. In a specific example, given two differing models of essentially the same business process derived from different sources, a process engineer can visually compare them and reconcile them into a single reference model.