Glossary · Interaction
Progressive Expand
Also known as: Incremental Expansion, On-Demand Expansion.
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.
Many real graphs are too large to render at once — millions of social connections, package dependencies, or knowledge-graph entities. Progressive expand reframes the problem: start with a single seed (the entity the user cares about), draw it and its immediate neighbors, and let the user click to expand further hops.
This approach keeps initial render fast, makes navigation feel intentional rather than overwhelming, and naturally limits the working set. It is the default UX in social-network investigation tools, knowledge-graph explorers, and dependency-tree analyzers.
In TopoKit, progressive expand is enabled with `expand.mode = "progressive"` and a callback that fetches a node's neighbors. The graph engine handles caching, deduplication, and re-layout transparently.
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