I suppose this is a follow-up to the Travelling Salesman discussion we had.

Are you even sure that the data is euclidian or even metric, i.e. projectable into a plane???

In general thats not solvable, if not!!!

(first imagine the problems from projecting distances from a spheric surface like the globe (which is still possible) and then think about randomly generated distances...)

Algorithm derived from school geometry

If they are metric euclidean you can start choosing freely point A, then B in a circle surrounding A, then C on one of the two crosspoints of the circles surrounding A and B.¹ From there on all other points are determined by the distances from A,B and C.³

After this you just need to transform the points (moving, rotating) to fit into a desired window.²

Then you are free to plot with the technology of your liking (Tk, SVG, graphviz,...)

HTH!

Cheers Rolf

( addicted to the Perl Programming Language)

updates
¹) Thats how a triangle is constructed with a pair of compasses, if only the length of three sides are given. Surprisingly I couldn't find an image in the net describing this. (update: watch animation here)

²) see Clipping_(computer_graphics)

³) and at least now it should be obvious why random distances to other points will fail.

In reply to Re: Data visualisation. (updated) by LanX
in thread Data visualisation. by BrowserUk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.