What you have is a "directed acyclic graph" (DAG), ie a graph (in the mathematical sense) in which the edges connecting nodes are one-way ("directed"), and such that following the edges in the right direction never creates a loop ("acyclic"). Such graphs are well-studied, and the constraints make it easy to automate creating images of them without edges having to cross each other, etc.

See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3522889/visualizing-a-dag for example.

In reply to Re: Visualizing a dependency graph in a web page by hv
in thread Visualizing a dependency graph in a web page by LanX

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