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Journal of Visual Languages and Computing

Journal of Visual Languages and Computing 21 (2010) 193

1045-92

doi:10.1

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jvlc

Editorial

Introduction to the special issue on graph visualization

Visual communication through graphical or signlanguages has long been conducted among human beingsof different backgrounds or cultures, and in recentdecades between human and machine. Graphs have beenpervasive in almost all disciplines, used to representrelationships among entities. Graph visualization hasbeen successfully employed in knowledge discovery,visual programming, modeling, social network analysis,education, and design activities by people of manydisciplines including architects, artists, children,engineers, and scientists. This special issue includes twopapers, selected from The 2009 Visual InformationCommunications International (VINCI’09), that was heldon 24–25 September 2009, in Sydney, Australia. All thepapers submitted to VINCI’09 were reviewed by at leastthree program committee members. The two papersselected for this special issue received the highest scores,with the most positive review comments. Each of the twopapers was then substantially extended with at least 50%more contents and further reviewed by an external experton graph visualization. The authors went through thesecond round of revisions and improvements before beingaccepted for this special issue.

The first paper, entitled ‘‘DaisyViz: A Model-based UserInterface Toolkit for Interactive Information VisualizationSystems’’ by Ren, Tian, Zhang, and Zhang, presents a model-based user interface toolkit, called DaisyViz. End-users wouldbe able to rapidly develop domain-specific graph visualiza-tion applications without programming. The paper discusses

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the concept of User Interface Model for Information (UIMI),the architecture of DaisyViz, and how to use DaisyViz to builda graph visualization system. The authors have also con-ducted a usability study and concluded that DaisyViz iseffective in helping end-users to build interactive graphvisualization systems.

The second paper, entitled ‘‘A New Concentric-CircleVisualization of Multi-Dimensional Data and Its Applica-tion in Network Security’’ by Lu, Zhang, Huang, and Fu,proposes a Concentric-Circle method for visualizingmultidimensional network of data. They use the methodto identify the main features of network attacks, such asDDoS attack, by displaying their recognizable visualpatterns. The basic idea is to arrange axes representingmultiple dimensions on concentric circles. Heuristics areused to improve the readability. This approach can reduceover 15% of the edge overlaps and crossings, comparedwith a parallel coordinate system. The authors haveimplemented the approach on a visual interactivenetwork scan detection system called CCScanViewer.

I would like to thank the authors for their efforts inenhancing and extending their papers for this specialissue. The Editor-In-Chief, Shi-Kuo Chang’s guidance andsupport are particularly appreciated.

Kang ZhangUniversity of Texas at Dallas, USA

E-mail address: kzhang@utdallas.edu