Welcome to GraVis

You have found the official site containing information about the graph drawing system GraVis . Follow the links to read about its features, availability, us and what we plan to add in the future. It's a good idea to bookmark our main page and come back often for updates . Btw, you will always get to our main page when you click on the GraVis logo at the top of our pages.

What is GraVis ?

Efficient and effective information visualization is crucial in many application domains and is becoming even more important, since the amount of data users are expected to handle is increasing rapidly. One of the best ways to model data and its dependencies are graphs , but this alone is limited without the ability to visualize these graphs. Thus there is a growing need of graph drawing systems and automatic graph layout generation.

GraVis has been designed to serve as a visualization tool usable in many application domains. To accomplish this, our main design goals have been extensibility and flexibility . The essence of these goals are that we did not want to introduce arbitrary limitations in the capabilities of GraVis like many of its predecessors did, and we wanted to give the user of GraVis the opportunity to create his own extension modules increasing the usability of GraVis in his or her particular application domain. More information on this topic can be found in the features section.

Who can use GraVis ?

Anyone who has to work with large sets of data is a potential user of GraVis . This includes but is certainly not limited to application domains like software engineering , database systems network management and many more. Last but not least GraVis is of course also a tool suited for research in the area of graph algorithms and graph drawing. Since this is the main area of interest of our research group, suggestions about new applications domains and its requirements are always welcome. Please contact us and we may even be able to design a layout algorithm especially for your needs.

The remaining question is if you have to pay for GraVis . It depends. In short, the research licence will always be free and the licence for commercial use will always cost you money. Individual, non-commercial use is currently free, but this is subject to change. Details can be found in the availability section. Finally, the platforms section contains the links to our ftp server, such that you can download the current version of GraVis

Harald Lauer(lauer@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de)