Hyperedge support by yEd

Question

Hi everyone,

I'm new to yEd.

I have plyed around with it and made searches on internet, but I cannot find any information about the support of the GraphML component hyperedge in yEd (http://www.yworks.com/xml/schema/graphml/1.0/doc/http___graphml.graphdrawing.org_xmlns_graphml/element/hyperedge.html#elem_endpoint)

Please answer me an save my time; thanks

If this possibility is not implemented, please implement it in a future release; tanks

Answer 1

yEd does not support hyperedges (neither does it support ports at ports).

It is rather unlikely that we will support these rather academic and exotic features in the foreseeable future. Many, many features in yEd (most notably the automatic layout algorithms) absolutely require that the diagrams in yEd are directed graphs in the strict sense (see e.g. Wikipedia for a corresponding definition).

Comments

Thank you for your answer.

As I have seen, there doesn't exist a single tool that supports hyperedge component; is that because of a difficulty in implementing it (eg. requires much CPU time to make small networks..)

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The main point not supporting this feature is that, in our opinion, there are not many applications in graph visualization which really require hyper edges. Therefore, we would like to hear about your use case.

From a conceptual point of view, it is often possible to model a hyper edge with a complete subgraph in the traditional graph model (each node is connected to each other node). Since this transformation typically results in a large number of edges, computations on hyper graphs are often more expensive than for normal graphs. And as additional disadvantage, since a larger number of edges results in general in a less readable diagram, these visualizations are often not very readable.

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Hello! I was looking up hypergraph support for your software, and I saw your comment. I totally understand that hypergraphs will not be used by business people. But biologists need them to accurately represent enzymatic pathways. A + B ==> C + D, via enzyme 1, which does the catalyzing, for example, is best represented by a hypergraph. If you could add it, that would be amazing! Not being able to represent hypergraphs creates a serious limitation for bio-systems analysis.

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and hypergraph is very suitable vizualization model for Prolog programs -- hyperedge looks like native reprezentation for terms and logic programming rules

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I'm also doing systems biology and would love to have a hyperedge feature for the same reason mentioned above. At the moment I have to decide if I want to have a graph for displaying purposes that only looks like a hypergraph, but is nonsense on the lower-level, or if I do it as you mentionned:
A -> Reaction 1
B -> Reaction 1
Reaction 1 -> C
Reaction 1 -> D

Answer 2

Despite hyper edges being not supported as graph elements, some of the layout algorithms in yEd are capable of creating hyper edge-like visualizations by placing parts of the path of edges on each other. See for example hierarchic layout with Automatic Edge grouping enabled or tree layout with 'Directed' Layout Style and Orthogonal Edge Routing enabled.