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How to Tame a Very Large ER Diagram (Using Link Analysis and Force-Directed Drawing Algorithms)

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Conceptual Modeling – ER 2005 (ER 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 3716))

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Abstract

Understanding a large schema without the assistance of persons already familiar with it (and its associated applications), is a hard and very time consuming task that occurs very frequently in reverse engineering and in information integration. In this paper we describe a novel method that can aid the understanding and the visualization of very large ER diagrams that is inspired by the link analysis techniques that are used in Web Searching. Specifically, this method takes as input an ER diagram and returns a smaller (top-k) diagram that consists of the major entity and relationship types of the initial diagram. Concerning the drawing of the resulting top-k graphs in the 2D space, we propose a force-directed placement algorithm especially adapted for ER diagrams. Specifically, we describe and analyze experimentally two different force models and various configurations. The experimental evaluation on large diagrams of real world applications proved the effectiveness of this technique.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Crete and FORTH-ICS, Heraklion, Greece

    Yannis Tzitzikas

  2. Institut d’Informatique, University of Namur (F.U.N.D.P.), Belgium

    Jean-Luc Hainaut

Authors
  1. Yannis Tzitzikas
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  2. Jean-Luc Hainaut
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Portland State University, 97207, Portland, OR

    Lois Delcambre

  2. Institute for Applied Informatics, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria

    Christian Kop  & Heinrich C. Mayr  & 

  3. Dept. of Information Engineering and Computer Science,  

    John Mylopoulos

  4. Department of Information Systems and Computation, Technical University of Valencia, Camino de Vera s/n, 46022, Valencia, Spain

    Oscar Pastor

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Tzitzikas, Y., Hainaut, JL. (2005). How to Tame a Very Large ER Diagram (Using Link Analysis and Force-Directed Drawing Algorithms). In: Delcambre, L., Kop, C., Mayr, H.C., Mylopoulos, J., Pastor, O. (eds) Conceptual Modeling – ER 2005. ER 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3716. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11568322_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11568322_10

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-29389-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32068-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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