DimFlux: Force-Directed Additive Line Diagrams
This work addresses visualization challenges for researchers in Formal Concept Analysis, representing an incremental improvement over prior methods.
The paper tackles the problem of visualizing concept lattices in Formal Concept Analysis by introducing DimFlux, an algorithm that generates additive diagrams with improved readability, achieving this by maximizing conflict distance between nodes and non-incident edges.
The visualization of concept lattices is a central problem in the field of Formal Concept Analysis. Force-directed algorithms, as popular in graph drawing, are a promising approach, treating lattice diagrams as physical models, optimizing node positions based on forces derived from the lattice structure. We build on the work of Zschalig, who, however, limited himself to attribute-additive diagrams. We use a more general additivity, in which both the attributes and the objects contribute to the positions of the concept nodes. We replace the planarity enhancer used by Zschalig to obtain a starting diagram for force-directed optimization with the DimDraw algorithm, which generates structured order diagrams on its own. The combination results in DimFlux, an algorithm that leverages the advantages of DimDraw but generates additive diagrams in which readability is increased by maximizing the conflict distance between nodes and non-incident edges.