Algorithms and interface enhancements for GraphEd

Graph editors can be a powerful visualization tool for research. A good editor allows the user to create, display, and manipulate graphs. Researchers demand many different things in such a tool. It may be difficult to find an implementation that is flexible enough and simple enough to assist in the research process.

Over the past year I have worked with graph algorithm researchers to see what features would make a graph editor most useful to them in their work. The researchers chose an existing graph editor package called GraphEd to experiment with. GraphEd was developed at the University of Passau, Germany, by Michael Himsolt. They liked some of its features, but came up with a wish list that would make it more beneficial to their work. This wish list included more algorithm modules and a more flexible interface that would allow the researcher to integrate his/her own algorithms with a minimum of reprogramming.

This paper describes these enhancements, and indicates some possible directions for future work.