Once a year the yWorks office is alive with a very special atmosphere: The project days. Small groups of developers gather together to work on projects that are not necessarily connected to the everyday work or the core products of the company. This year, four brave developers set out to new lands and tried to parse photos and screenshots of diagrams as actual yFiles graphs without ever having touched computer vision topics before. This is their story.

With the new 2.2 release of yFiles for HTML yWorks again proves to be the leading provider of professional high-quality graph diagramming software libraries. The new release contains new features, unmatched in the industry, that will both delight existing customers and will open the product to a wider audience range.

Neo4j is great for storing and processing large amounts of connected data. For example, in web analytics, where click-paths and custom events get logged, it is easy to get that data into Neo4j. Once the data is in the graph database, complex queries may be executed that help both site administrators and site owners get a good understanding of how their users and visitors use the website or ecommerce store.

Every year, the Graph Drawing conference organizes a contest which sets the task to visualize predetermined graph data. This year, the data consists of a graph that presents the relationships between 84 characters from the popular TV series ‘Game of Thrones’. Since our yFiles diagramming library is designed to arrange and visualize graph structures, we decided to participate in the contest. The image above shows a preview of our contribution. Read on if you want to find out how we created it or skip to the final result.

Metro maps are a very important tool when it comes to illustrating routes of a public transport system. The history of metro maps or, more generally, transport maps, goes back to the famous 'Tube Map' created by Harry Beck in 1931 which shows the London Underground. Nowadays they exist for almost every larger urban area, making it easy for passengers to quickly gain an overview over the possible routes and reachable stations. Simply put, metro maps consist of stations or stops which are connected by lines. So we thought that they are a perfect match for the visualization using our yFiles diagramming library. Our goal was to automatically generate maps from data retrieved online and to polish the results using styles similar to the ones found in official maps. As the computation of a new metro map layout is quite CPU intensive, the goal was not to create maps in real time.

There are two major use-cases for the visualization of data in graph databases like Neo4j:

Recently we have started working on the visualization of SBGN process description maps. SBGN stands for Systems Biology Graphical Notation and is an effort to provide a standardized graphical notation for molecular and system-biology applications that describe biological pathways/networks. Pathways are modeled as abstract graphs and, thus, we can apply our yFiles diagramming library for their visualization. Visualization facilitates the communication of complex information and, thus, is especially useful for such applications with their huge amount of structured data.

Ever since we released our commercial graph drawing library for HTML5 and JavaScript/Typescript, we have been working hard to get the best possible performance that is available on the HTML5 platform: Our initial implementation six years ago only supported SVG, because we found it to be the most flexible, most widely available and easy to work with API for us and our customers, who are also developers. At that time (when Internet Explorer 9 was still in wide use), it already was the best performing technology, at least if you wanted to render high-quality, non-trivial, large-scale graphics.

The 2.1 release of our graph drawing and network visualization library yFiles for HTML contains a lot of new features that both our existing customers and new customers can benefit from.