At the recent Eurovis conference, Danny Holten and Prof. van Wijk presented a paper entitled “Force-Directed Edge Bundling for Graph Visualization”.  They merged the concept of edge bundling with force-directed network graphs, also known as node-link graphs, to show graphs with significantly less clutter and highlight high-level edge patterns.  The picture above models the edges as flexible springs attracted to each other.

Get the paper here.

Force-Directed Edge Bundling for Graph Visualization – information aesthetics.