ADraw: A novel social network visualization tool with attribute-based layout and coloring

Visualization is an important tool for social network analysis. Traditional visualization tools only take account into the links in the networks when displaying them. However, social networks are inherently attached to abundant attribute information. In order to display their attribute information, a novel visualization tool with attribute-based layout and coloring is developed in this paper. The core of this tool are two algorithms: one for node layout and the other for node coloring. These two algorithms are designed based on the principle of making the nodes with same attribute values closer in the diagram. The experiments on synthetic networks and real-world networks show that this tool can return more reasonable visualization.