Complex Network Visualization And Link OLAP

Complex Network is so complicated that if we only use data table or text to express it, the network will be hard to understand and the contained information could not be revealed. The best way to express complex network is visualization whose related research areas involve complex system, graph theory, statistics, data mining, information visualization and human-machine conversation.After long period of development, data warehouse and OLAP have already had an integrated system of theory and technology in logical model, physical model and visualization. Since there are specific observational points and some limited factors in traditional OLAP, we present a new OLAP concept: Link OLAP.This paper discusses the above two technologies. At first, base on the survey of complex network visualization we summarize and present some of its key technologies, and also probe into some implementation details. Then we focus on discussing the new OLAP concept - Link OLAP. Via expanding the entity-oriented analysis into link-oriented analysis, Link OLAP could solve problems more refinedly than traditional OLAP under certain scenarios, including complex network or large scale network contained a mass of links. Base on complex network visualization technology, Link OLAP could provide a friendly interactive visualization user interface, rather than the planar table representation of traditional OLAP. Furthermore, we also give a sample implementation of Link OLAP system in detail, which includes architecture design, bottom layer implementation and some core module analysis. At last, we explain the practical effect of Link OLAP system using an application demo.