Overview
ALberta system for VIsualizing large Networks (ALVIN)
is a prototype system that allows very large networks (that often won't
fit in main memory) to be visualized. Our techniques for visualizing large networks
are based on effectively abstracting the network and reducing the size to a level that
can clearly be visualized. Our techniques to reduce the size of the network are
based on sampling where only a sample, instead of the full network, is visualized.
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A screen shot of ALVIN being used to visualize connections
between the sites ualberta.ca, utoronto.ca, uwaterloo.ca, princeton.edu,
stanford.edu, and mit.edu.
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What can you visualize with ALVIN?
Any network or graph can be visualized with ALVIN regardless of whether
this network is directed or weighted. As well ALVIN makes no
assumptions on the size of the network to be visualized.
The datasets that we visualized are the linkage structure of a snapshot of the Web in 1999 and the movie database.
Project Members
Davood Rafiei | | Stephen Curial |
Department of Computing Science | | Department of Computing Science |
University of Alberta | | University of Alberta |
Publications
- D. Rafiei, S. Curial,
ALVIN: A System for Visualizing Large Networks, (Poster) Proc. of the World Wide
Web Conference, Japan, May 2005.
- D. Rafiei, S. Curial,
Effectively Visualizing Large Networks Through Sampling,
Proc. of the IEEE Visualization Conference, Minneapolis, Oct. 2005
(to appear).
Screen shots created using ALVIN
The movie database.
38 hand picked actors were placed in the focus set. We did a focused
growth at rate (1,1) selecting 400 edges. We then did a focused growth
at rate (1,0) selecting 500 edges. The actors in the green rectangles
were part of the focus set. Tha actors in the blue ovals were not in
the focus set but rather identified by the second growth. | |

cs.ualberta
The focus set is all of the pages in the cs.ualberta.ca site. Select
800 edges with the condition that at least one endpoint is in the focus
set.
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focus set .org (1,0)
The focus set is all of the sites in the .org domain. We did a focused growth at rate (1,0).
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focus set .org (1,1)
The focus set is all of the sites in the .org domain. We did a focused growth at rate (1,1)
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 sample of the internet
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