Drawing Clustered Bipartite Graphs in Multi-circular Style

Bipartite graphs are often used to illustrate relationships between two sets of data, such as web pages and visitors. At the same time, information is often organized hierarchically, for example, web pages are divided into directories by their contents. The hierarchical structures are useful for analyzing information. Graphs with both a bipartite structure and a hierarchical structure are called “clustered bipartite graphs.” A new clustered bipartite graphs visualization technique was developed for representing both bipartite and hierarchical structures simultaneously. In this technique, nodes in one set of the bipartite graph, which are leaves of a tree, are arranged in hierarchical multi-circular style. Then, nodes in the other set of the bipartite graph are arranged by the force-directed method. The technique enables step-by-step exploration for large-scale bipartite graphs.