Organic Layout

An organic layout is based on the force-directed layout paradigm. When calculating a layout, the entities are considered to be physical objects with mutually repulsive forces, such as protons or electrons. The connections between entities also follow the physical analogy and are considered to be springs attached to the pair of entities. These springs produce repulsive or attractive forces between their end points if they are too short or too long. The layout algorithm simulates these physical forces and rearranges the positions of the entities in such a way that the sum of the forces emitted by the entities and the relationships reaches a (local) minimum. Resulting layouts often expose the inherent symmetric and clustered structure of a model; they show a well-balanced distribution of entities and have few relationship crossings.

An organic layout is useful for models that use enterprise networking, system management, and WWW visualization.