Layout algorithm that understands compass rose

Question

I want to visualize a graph that represents some geographical map. As such, the edges of my graph are associated with the compass rose (north, south, east, west). The graph itself is directed and can be made acyclic.

For example I have nodes: House-1, House-2, House-3 with edges [House-1, north-of, House-2], [House-2, east-of, House-3].

I'm looking for a layout algorithm that can be made to understand the compass rose (perhaps as hints?)

I've gone through JUNG, JGraph, GraphViz and none seem to do what I want but I may have missed something.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

There was a recent paper that dealt with this problem, in which they were trying to reconstruct old Korean land records (cadasters). There is a layout algorithm in the paper that should do what you want. It doesn't provide all the details, but it does give the outline and citations to specifics.

Hyungmin Lee, Sooyun Lee, Namwook Kim, and Jinwook Seo. 2012. JigsawMap: connecting the past to the future by mapping historical textual cadasters. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 463-472. DOI=10.1145/2207676.2207740.