A "Google wonder wheel" or "visualthesaurus" like diagram control for .net?

Question

I'm looking for a graph control that works just like Google wonder wheel or Thinkmap visual thesaurus. I don't know what do these types of diagrams called. Any help would be appreciated. I have a series of non-hierarchical related data entities (should be shown as big and small circles) and I want to show their relation (lines between the circles).

Answer 1

I think you are after this effect, i also dont know if it has a specific name: http://www.dotnetsolutions.co.uk/successes/wikiexplorer/ http://www.dotnetsolutions.co.uk/assets/images/screenshots/we1.png thats in wpf so maybe there is source floating around for it - or maybe .net reflector can help you work out how it is done.

I have not seen any components that do this automatically, your best bet is to use one of the many graph libraries on codeplex.com to create a graph like data structure and display it - they have integrated visualisation and graph layout tools included within them.

A few links from my notebook:

• http://quickgraph.codeplex.com/
• possible component set: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/494E7990-2722-4A4E-B0E3-AE1F2A831B7E
• http://opendiagram.codeplex.com/
• http://graphsharp.codeplex.com/
• http://research.microsoft.com/apps/dp/search.aspx?q=GLEE#p=1&ps=36&so=1&sb=&fr=&to=&fd=&td=&rt=&f=&a=&pn=GLEE&pa=&pd=
• http://wpfgraph.codeplex.com/
• http://mgdisplay.codeplex.com/

i'm afraid i've not used any of them in depth so cant recommend one over the other - also be careful as some of them are released under different licenses.

hope this helps

David