Topic 2: Composers Graph

The composers graph is a large directed graph, where the nodes represent Wikipedia articles about composers, and the edges represent links between these articles. The graph has too many nodes and edges to be effectively presented in a straightforward way.

The task is to select the about 150 most important nodes and to create a drawing of a subgraph containing these nodes. Part of the task is to define important in a suitable way. This criterion should only depend on the given graph, not on any other sources (like further knowledge about the composers). You are also allowed to filter out some edges between important nodes; if you do so, please describe your criterion for filtering edges as well.

Your visualization should be submitted in a common vector graphics format (preferably as a PDF), along with a description of your criterion for importance (and filtering edges) as well as how the layout has been calculated (e.g., which algorithms or software has been used). This graph has already been used as contest graph in 2011, but this time we changed the task and we are just looking for a single static drawing. In particular, we do not allow other kinds of visualizations like movies or interactive tools.

Data set

The graph is given as an XML file:

• Composers Graph [XML-file, 665KB]

The XML file is structured as follows:

• The nodes are defined by <node> tags and the edges by <edge> tags.
• Each node has attributes for its ID and the name of the composer whose Wikipedia article is represented by this node.
• Each edge has attributes for its source and target nodes (identified by their IDs), which means that the Wikipedia article about the composer represented by the source node contains a link to the article about the composer represented by the target node.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<graph>
    <nodes>
        <node id="4" name="Raymond Deane"/>
        ...
        <node id="3408" name="Erland von Koch"/>
    </nodes>
    <edges>
        <edge source="2139" target="3201"/>
		...
        <edge source="1858" target="3201"/>
    </edges>
</graph>