NetV.js: A web-based library for high-efficiency visualization of large-scale graphs and networks

Abstract

Graph visualization plays an important role in several fields, such as social media networks, protein–protein interaction networks, and traffic networks. A number of visualization design tools and programming toolkits have been widely used in graph-related applications. However, a key challenge remains in the high-efficiency visualization of large-scale graph data. In this study, we present NetV.js, an open-source and WebGL-based JavaScript library that supports the fast visualization of large-scale graph data (up to 50 thousand nodes and 1 million edges) at an interactive frame rate with a commodity computer. Experimental results demonstrate that our library outperforms existing toolkits (Sigma.js, D3.js, Cytoscape.js, and Stardust.js) in terms of performance.

Keywords

• Graph
• Graph visualization
• Network visualization
• Node-link diagram