Welcome to the interactive graph visualization system daVinci. You can always go back to this page by using menu Help/Introduction in daVinci.

daVinci is a universal, generic visualization system for automatic generation of high-quality drawings of directed graphs. Graphs are frequently used in computer applications as a general data structure to represent objects and relationships between them. They are used to implement hierarchies, dependency structures, networks, configurations, dataflows, and so on. In despite of this manifold demand, techniques to visualize such graphs are not common in today's computer applications. So frequently a user has to deal with uncomfortable textual interfaces or poor ad-hoc drawings of graphs, because high-quality graph layout is difficult to implement and reusable tools for graph visualization are often hard to find.

This fact was the motivation for developing the interactive graph visualization system daVinci. The primary objective is to provide a universal layout tool for directed graphs. This way any application program can be equiped with a comfortable daVinci graph user interface in a very short time, and the application programmer does not need to deal with layout algorithms and computer graphics. Instead, the application is able to send its graphs to daVinci's API (Application Programmer Interface) and let daVinci do the visualization.

daVinci is developed since the end of 1992 at the Computer Science Department of Universität Bremen, Germany. The developers of daVinci are Michael Fröhlich (until November 1997) and Mattias Werner, with the help of Sebastian Mangels (User-Interface of daVinci V2.x). More than 6600 unique sites have already fetched daVinci from the ftp server at Universität Bremen, not counting numerous ftp mirror servers in Europe, America, Asia and Australia. We have been informed about more than 3000 daVinci installations at educational and commercial sites all over the world by e-mail feedback. The estimated total number of sites using daVinci seems to be much higher. On the daVinci WWW server, we provide more information about selected daVinci sites and their applications. daVinci is free available for non-profit use (read the license agreement) and can be downloaded by anonymous ftp. Papers about daVinci and references about related work can be found in the bibliography.

What you should read next:

• It is recommended to start by reading the Using the Online Documentation page.
• Be sure to take a look at the daVinci Internet Resources, e.g. WWW server, mailing list and bug-report.
• For getting an overview continue by reading about daVinci's concepts.
• Finally take a look at the Tutorial for a guided tour through daVinci V2.1.x.