Heuristics for Laying Out Information Graphs

Abstract

The concept of an information graph is introduced as a representation for object-oriented databases. The retrieval layout problem is an optimization problem defined over the class of information graphs. The layout abstracts the space efficiency of representing the database as well as the time efficiency of information retrieval. Heuristics for the retrieval layout problem are identified and evaluated experimentally. A new heuristic, connectivity traversal, is found to be fast and to produce high quality layouts.