Knowledge-based Software Representation, Querying and Visualization
Peter Kapec · 2011
Among various data types that can be visualized, recently software became one of the most important candidate for visualization. With the increasing complexity of developed software systems the need for better means to understand software are needed. Software visualization aims to help with these problems by providing graphical presentations and thus allows discussion between developers in the domain of these graphical representations rather than mental concepts. In this work we presents an alternative software visualization method based on hypergraphs. We have developed a visualization system that utilize hypergraph-based representation of software artifacts and relations between them. We present how hypergraphs can be used in all stages of the visualization process and how they are used as the unifying data representation. Interactive 3D visualization displays directly these hypergraph representations of software. To allow ltering we have developed a query mechanism in which queries are hypergraph patterns and results are also hypergraphs. This way the visualization system is build around only one data structure.