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by hobofan 836 days ago
> we are used that everything around us have some kind of hierarchy

I think the problem is more that we are used to the illusion/delusion that everything is hierarchical. The problem that we then encouter is with graph drawing is that it has to try and reconcile the fact that things in practice are rarely really hierarchical, and it's hard to draw those lines of where the hierarchies are with mathematical rigor. And that problem gets worse and worse the less properties you are allowed to assume about the underlying graph structure (connectedness, cyclic/acyclic, sparse/dense).

In practice when you want build a UI that interacts with graphs it's often feasible to determine/impose one or two levels of meta-hierarchy with which you can do clustering (allows for reducing layout destroying impact of hairball nodes + improves rendering performance by reducing node count) and layout with fCOSE (Cytoscape.js has an implementation of that).