Press Center: Product Descriptions

aiSee automatically calculates a customizable layout of graphs specified in GDL (Graph Description Language). This layout is then displayed, and can be interactively explored, printed and exported to various graphic formats.

A picture is worth a thousand words

When working with any kind of complex relational data, visualization provides for much better and faster understanding. Back in 1991, aiSee was developed to visualize the internal data structures typically found in compilers. Today it is used in many different areas:

• Genealogy (family trees, evolution diagrams, pedigrees)
• Business management (organization charts)
• Software development (call graphs, control flow graphs)
• Hardware design (circuit diagrams, finite state diagrams)
• Bioinformatics (metabolic and signaling pathways, protein interaction maps, gene expression graphs, shared GeneOntology annotations, literature co-citation relations)
• Database management (entity relationship diagrams)
• Informatics (algorithm visualization)
• Web design (sitemaps, visitor movement graphs)
• Network analysis (P2P networks, IRC networks, social networks, the Internet)
• Linguistics (syntax trees, grammar graphs, term variant graphs)
• Criminology (fraud networks, felony event flow diagrams)

aiSee has been optimized to handle huge graphs automatically generated by applications (e.g. compilers). It runs under Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, and is available free of charge for non-commercial usage.

History

aiSee is based on the graph layout tool VCG (Visualization of Compiler Graphs). The work on VCG started as a diploma thesis at the Saarland University in 1991. The goal was to develop a tool that supports the understanding of the internal data structures of a compiler.

It became soon clear that such a graph layout tool was very useful in the context of compiler construction, e.g, for the debugging of compilers. The department for programming languages and compiler construction at the Saarland University decided to increase the efforts in the graph layout area, and VCG was redesigned, widely extended and reimplemented.

The VCG tool won the Graph Visualization Competitions

• In Princeton in 1994 (in the “Directed Graphs” category)
• In Passau in 1995 (in category A, with honorable mention in category B)

The development of a non-public version of VCG at the Saarland University continued until 1996.

In January 2000, AbsInt licensed the non-public version of VCG from the Saarland University and resumed its development under the name aiSee (pronounced as “I see!”).

Today, with thousands of users in well over 40 countries worldwide and hundreds of downloads each week, aiSee is one of AbsInt's most successful products.