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Network visualization

A comprehensive overview of network visualization and its applications, with links to videos, blogs and other resources from subject specialists.

What is network visualization?

 

Network visualization, also known as graph visualization or link analysis, is the process of visually presenting networks of connected entities as links and nodes.

Nodes represent data points, and links represent the connections between them. To look beyond your flat data model and understand connections in your data, you need powerful network visualization tools.

At Cambridge Intelligence, we help developers build interactive tools for visualizing networks that are 100% customized to their users, their data and the questions they need to answer.

Why visualize networks?

The world is densely connected. If there’s an interesting relationship in your data, you’ll find value in visualizing networks.

It’s intuitive

Exploring networks as node-link structures instantly makes sense, even to people who’ve never worked with connected data before.

It’s fast

Our brains are great at spotting patterns, but only when the info is in a tangible format. Visualizing data as a network helps you identify trends and outliers quickly.

Hierarchical graph icon

It’s flexible

Interactive network visualization simplifies complexity, revealing context and connections on demand. It’s ideal for getting a quick overview or focusing on specific connections.

It’s insightful

Through interactive data analysis, you gain deeper knowledge and understand context. That’s hard to achieve with a static, aggregated visualization.

Network visualization use cases

Geospatial visualization

Security & Intelligence

Network visualization and analysis enable investigative teams to transform sprawling datasets into clear, actionable intelligence.

By revealing connections between people, places, events, and evidence, these tools help answer critical investigative questions that traditional methods might miss.

Applications include mapping organized crime structures, establishing chains of custody, recognizing repeat offender patterns, and discovering connections across separate investigations.

timebar

Risk & compliance

Sophisticated fraud schemes typically involve coordinated networks rather than isolated actors. Network visualization empowers investigators to expose organized fraud operations, identify fabricated identities built from stolen credentials, follow illicit fund movements across account networks, and spot suspicious activity patterns in their early stages.

These investigative techniques are used across financial services, insurance claims, healthcare billing, online gaming, consumer reviews, and misinformation tracking.

Credit card demo

IT Management & network visualization

IT environments generate huge volumes of operational data across services, applications and infrastructure systems that are interconnected across cloud and on-prem environments.

IT infrastructure visualization enable teams to understand complex IT systems, so they can monitor network health, prevent outages and achieve performance and cost optimizations with interactive graph, timeline and geospatial visualization.

Cybersecurity & OSINT investigations

Publicly available intelligence sources present inherent challenges: fragmentation, noise, and sheer volume. Conventional analytical approaches often prove inadequate for extracting meaningful intelligence. Network visualization addresses these challenges directly.

Since OSINT work centers on mapping relationships among actors, organizations, and incidents across diverse data sources, network visualization provides an intuitive framework for analysis even in highly complex scenarios.

Curved links

Supply chain and network digital twins

Effective supply chain oversight requires visibility into interdependencies spanning procurement, production, logistics, distribution, and reverse logistics operations. Network visualization helps with analyzing complex operational networks at enterprise scale.

Representing supply chain components and flows as connected networks or temporal sequences enables organizations to maintain operational continuity and optimize performance.

What types of networks can be visualized?

We think there are no networks that CAN’T be visualized. If your data contains complex connections, you’ll find value in visualizing it. We’ve even started mapping the internet. Here are a few more common examples we’ve worked on with our customers:

Infrastructure

From the internet to gas pipelines, corporate IT systems to global telecoms networks: network and timeline visualization are the best tools for making sense of complex infrastructure data.

IT networks

Understanding big, complex telecoms networks is challenging. With the help of network visualization, it doesn’t need to be.

Supply chain

More and more businesses are digitizing their supply chain processes. Our latest demo shows how KronoGraph, our time-based visual analytics toolkit, can support a reliable management tool with supply chain data visualization at its heart.

Network visualization best practices

How to build an interactive network visualization

So, you’ve chosen the tools and tech stack that work for you. It’s time to start designing the perfect network visualization. Find out how to build a network analysis dashboard that gives a great user experience – and take it to the next level with powerful timeline visualization.

In this short video, you’ll learn about the benefits of using KeyLines and ReGraph, our JavaScript software development kits, for your connected data visualization project.

Building a great user experience (UX)

Build visual network analysis dashboards that work

Open any data management app and the first thing you’ll see is a complex data dashboard of bar graphs, pie charts and metrics. But if your users need to track, measure and analyze connected data, what they really need is visual network analysis.

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Get the perfect look & feel for your data visualizations

Building a data visualization into your products is about more than just putting information on a screen. Your visualization is probably part of a larger, carefully-designed, product UI.

Visualizing networks that evolve over time

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Dynamic network visualization methods explained

Most connected data has a time-stamped element. Sometimes, that time element holds the insight that unlocks everything else. A time bar gives users the ability to filter and summarize time-based connected data without overwhelming them.

KronoGraph: the timeline visualization toolkit

Take your connected data visualization to the next level with KronoGraph, the first toolkit for scalable timeline visualizations that reveal patterns in time data.

Visualizing data at scale

Layouts for visualizing large networks

There’s no more famous network than the internet itself. But highly connected networks present data visualization challenges. In this blog, we’ll map out the shape of a small portion of the internet with a network chart.

Network alert and network topology visualization

Understanding big, complex network topologies, like IT infrastructure or telecoms networks is challenging. With the help of network visualization, it doesn’t need to be.

Common network visualization challenges

Hairballs, snowstorms and starbursts can be a problem for many network visualization projects, cluttering up charts and concealing crucial insights from investigators and analysts. But we have solutions – click on the images below to learn more.

hairball effect in graph visualization

Hairballs

Dense, overconnected networks where everything touches everything and nothing stands out.

Snowstorm effect in graph visualization

Snowstorms

Hundreds or thousands of tiny disconnected components with no meaningful structure.

Starburst effect in graph visualization

Starbursts

Explosions of nodes around a single hub that overwhelm the chart.

Network visualization tools and tutorials

When it comes to building your own web application visualizing connected data, you have options.

There are standalone tools, or community-built open source code libraries, or you can create something in-house from scratch. If you want the best of all worlds, our commercial SDKs are market leaders. They deliver the customizability and flexibility of in-house components, with the reliability, robustness, performance and advanced functionality of a technology backed by a dedicated team of experts.

KeyLines

KeyLines

The JavaScript SDK for graph visualization

ReGraph

ReGraph

The React SDK for state-driven graph visualization

MapWeave

MapWeave

The geospatial visualization SDK for uncovering hidden connections

KronoGraph timeline visualization

KronoGraph

The timeline visualization SDK for investigating event data at scale