Creative Topic

In 2024 the 33rd Olympic games are going to be held in Paris, France. Shortly after the 32nd edition of the Graph Drawing Symposium is going to take place in Vienna, Austria. To honor this close numerical proximity the committee chose a dataset focusing on the countries and their medals at the Olympic games for this years contest. Like last year, we again have a single creative topic, and each participant may submit one drawing on this topic for evaluation.

Countries at the Olympics

Download link: Olympic games

The graph is bipartite. One set of vertices represents a coarse partitioning of the sports at the Olympics. The categories are:

  • Athletics
  • Boating
  • Equestrian
  • Fighting
  • Gymnastics
  • Racquet
  • Shooting
  • Swimming
  • Teams
  • Other

The other set is the set of countries also including countries that do no longer exist or compete, for example the USSR.

There is an edge between a country and a category if the country won at least one medal in some event that is part of the category. In total there are 163 vertices and 700 edges.

Each edge comes with a set of metadata. Each entry in this set is a record with the following data:

{
    "athlete": {
        "name": "<NAME OF ATHELETE>", 
        "sex": "<MALE OR FEMALE>", 
        "born": "<DATE OF BIRTH yyyy-mm-dd>", 
        "height": "<HEIGHT IN cm OR na IF NOT AVAILABLE>", 
        "weight": "<WEIGHT IN kg OR na IF NOT AVAILABLE>"
    }, 
    "sport": "<OLYMPIC SPORT>", 
    "event": "<NAME OF EVENT>", 
    "year": "<YEAR OF THE RESULT>", 
    "city": "<CITY>", 
    "medal": "<MEDAL TYPE>"
}

The graph format is as follows.

{
    "directed": false, 
    "multigraph": false, 
    "graph": {},
    "nodes": [
        {
            "name": "<CATEGORY>", 
            "id": "<CATEGORY>", 
            "noc": "<ABBREVIATION OF COUNTRY IF COUNTRY>"
        },...
    ],
    "links": [
        {
            "attr": ["<RECORD AS ABOVE>",...],
            "source": "<VERTEX>",
            "target": "<VERTEX>"
        }
    ]
}

The following is a sample visualization of the graph. Note that the visualization is not meant to be an example for your submission, but rather just a first look into how the graph might look like.

Evaluation

You are completely free to use any graph drawing style you wish. We leave it up to the contestants how they produce the drawing. Any tool is allowed to generate the poster and the drawing.

The expectation is that the visualization represents the relational information between the vertices. Whether all edges and vertices are to be visualized is left to the authors: we would ideally push to visualize every edge individually, but authors might decide to only select a subset of the information in the dataset. The visualization submitted should still strive to represent the vast majority of the relational information. Furthermore, every submission should show use at least some of the available metadata. To facilitate the choice for which metadata to visualize, we ask each submission to specify one or a few questions that you want to answer with your visualization. Your submission should strive to structurally and thematically provide an answer to your own proposed question(s).

The following is a set of questions that the authors might use as inspiration for what could be inferred from the dataset:

  • Temporal: How has the graph structure evolved over time with each Olympic event? Are there any noticeable changes in the graph's topology across different Olympic years?
  • Comparative: How do the subgraphs of male and female athletes differ in terms of structure and connectivity?
  • Clustering: Can clusters or communities of countries with similar Olympic success profiles be identified within the graph? Are there distinct communities within the graph based on geographical or cultural similarities? For instance, are countries that excel in swimming close to the sea?

The questions are meant as inspiration for the authors, and they might decide to formulate their own set of questions. We suggest to explicitly state the questions the authors wanted to answer with their visualization directly on the poster, either as part of the title or as part of the textual content of it.

The authors can also consider enriching the dataset with additional information - for instance, by integrating geographical coordinates or shapes of the countries.

Your submissions will be judged on a list of criteria that includes, but is not limited to, readability, aesthetics, novelty, and design quality. We’re looking for submissions that show the general structure well, and reveal fun, interesting, curious and/or thought-provoking aspects of the provided data.

In case your submission showcases the result of a tool, you may also provide a link to the (online) tool. Note that even in this case, your submission should be able to provide a compelling drawing in a static and non-interactive way, for example on a poster; see also Submission for the exact submission format. In case of sufficient submissions and no clear winner between submissions that do and do not showcase tools can be determined, the committee reserves the possibility to award multiple first, second, or third places.

Submission

We plan to handle the submission through Easychair.

Link to submission system: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=gdc2024

and must be received by

Sunday, 1st of September 2024 (Anywhere On Earth)

The submission must be a pdf version of your visualization, suitable for printing on a large A0 poster. Your submission should also include the following information, either added to the pdf file, or in the abstract:

  • A brief description on how the graph and layout were produced (max 2 DIN A4 pages - consider this an extended abstract).
  • A link to a web-friendly image of your visualization, max resolution 1500 by 1500 pixels and 10 megabytes.
  • (Optional) A link to a visualization illustrating the graph in a format of your choosing (e.g., an interactive tool).

If your drawing requires special printing because of size, resolution, or color constraints, you are encouraged to print the submission as a poster yourself and bring it to the conference, preferably before the first session, but no later than noon on the first day of the conference. At the conference, members of the committee can help you with hanging your poster. Please let us know via email that you are bringing the poster yourself.