3D Visualization of Network Including Nodes with Labels

Visual cluttering is still a severe problem of large-scale network visualization techniques, and therefore many improvements on network visualization have been presented. Meanwhile, many network datasets in our daily life contain label information. We are developing a network visualization technique which overlays a node-link diagram for visualizing the connectivity and a set visualization for representing the label information. Our technique firstly places a set of nodes in an input dataset into a 3D space and provides an interactive mechanism to manipulate viewpoints in the 3D space. The technique then projects the nodes onto a 2D plane and generates a Delaunay triangular mesh connecting the nodes which have the user-specified label on the 2D plane. Finally, it displays the outer boundary of the triangular mesh to represent the region enclosing the nodes which have the label. In addition, supposing that multiple weighted labels can be assigned to the same node, our implementation draws nodes like pie charts to clearly represent the weights of labels assigned to the nodes. This paper shows examples of the visualization applying a co-authorship network dataset.