CiFDAL: A Graph Layout Algorithm to Enhance Human Cognition in Idea Discovery

Idea Graph is a core component of Idea Discovery, which discovers idea by converting unstructured data into a scenario graph. Since the scenario graph is complex and heterogeneous, the layouts generated by general graph layout algorithms can´t well support human cognition. To tackle this issue, a novel graph layout algorithm named CiFDAL is proposed, which is a hybrid of circular layout algorithm and Force-Directed Algorithm (FDA). Overall, it places clusters and key nodes on two nested circles, and different hierarchies distinguish their different importance. Specifically, it uses FDA to ensure the related nodes being closer in distance. Additionally, it improves the classical random initialized FDA by adopting a better initial position set and iterative node-position exchange technique. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our algorithm by comparing with several benchmarks implemented in a famous visualization tool - GraphViz.