Visualizing small-world networks such as protein-protein interaction networks (PPIs) or social networks often leads to visual clutter and limited interpretability. To overcome these problems, we present ProtEGOnist, a visualization application designed to explore small-world networks. ProtEGOnist addresses the challenges using ego-graphs that represent local neighborhoods around nodes of interest. These ego-graphs are arranged in an ego-graph network, where edges between ego-graphs encode their similarity using the Jaccard index. Our design aims to reduce visual complexity and clutter while enabling detailed exploration, and facilitating the discovery of meaningful patterns. To achieve this, our application offers an overview using ego-graphs covering a large portion of the original nodes and edges, a radar chart for a one-to-many ego-graph comparison, and detailed ego-graph subnetworks for interactive exploration.
Visit ProtEGOnist at https://protegonist-tuevis.cs.uni-tuebingen.de/
GitHub: https://github.com/UniTuebingen-BDVA/ProtEGOnist
How to cite
Brich, N., Harbig, T.A., Witte Paz, M., Nieselt, K. and Krone, M. (2024), ProtEGOnist: Visual Analysis of Interactions in Small World Networks Using Ego-graphs. Computer Graphics Forum e15078. https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.15078