Graph Visualization Glossary
Plain-English definitions of the terms you'll see across the TopoKit docs, comparison pages, and code examples. If something is missing, tell us.
Layouts
Force-Directed Layout
A graph layout that simulates physical springs and electrical charges so connected nodes attract and unconnected nodes repel.
Dagre Layout
A layered layout for directed graphs that arranges nodes into ranks and routes edges to minimize crossings — the standard choice for flowcharts and DAGs.
Hierarchical Layout
A top-down (or left-right) layout for trees and acyclic hierarchies that places parent nodes above their children.
Rendering
Force-Directed Edge Bundling (FDEB)
A technique that groups visually similar edges into smooth bundles, dramatically reducing visual clutter in dense graphs.
Level of Detail (LOD) Culling
A rendering optimization that draws fewer details (or skips elements entirely) when the user is zoomed out, keeping frame times low on large graphs.
Spatial Indexing
A data structure (typically a quadtree or R-tree) that lets a renderer answer "which nodes are visible right now?" in O(log n) instead of O(n).
Web Worker Layout
Running graph layout computation in a Web Worker so the main UI thread stays responsive even for graphs with thousands of nodes.
Canvas Renderer
A graph renderer that draws nodes and edges onto an HTML5 <canvas> element using the Canvas2D API, instead of creating SVG or DOM elements per node.
Interaction
Graph Clustering
Grouping graph nodes by a shared attribute (department, region, type) and aggregating the edges between groups so users can collapse and expand whole subgraphs.
Progressive Expand
An interaction pattern where the user starts with a single seed node and expands its neighbors on demand, instead of loading the entire graph upfront.