What algorithms are good for interactive/realtime graph-drawing?

Question

What algorithms are good for interactive/realtime graph-drawing for live data and direct-manipulation?

Failing that - what libraries do you use to draw graphs?

Answer 1

Graph drawing is a large field. Here's a link to a graph drawing research community web site. They have an annual conference specifically about graph drawing. I can also suggest reading some of Prof. David Harel's Publications - one of his research areas is graph drawing, for example this paper. This seems like a hard problem to solve in the general case. Maybe you can limit your application to some restricted subset of graphs (planar graphs is probably too restrictive). Probably simple graphs with a small set of vertices yield easier manipulation.