Simple API to handle graphs. Even though this package is part of the hypergraph project, the classes can also be used in other contexts to handle graphs.

All parts of a graph and even the graph itself are derived from the interface Element. This interface provides three properties, a name of the element, a group and a type identifier. The name of an element is usually used to identify or label an element and are guaranted to be unique within a GraphSystem. It can never be changed and has to be set during instantiation. The group property of the elements is used to group sets of elements for example to reflect clustering of the graph or to attach default attributes. The type identifier gives an application the possibility to identify whether an element is an edge, node or whatever. Since there might be more than one class that represents an edge or node, the reflection functionality of java is not useful to identify the type.

It is often important to assign certain properties or attributes to an element of a graph, for example a colour that is used in visualizations or attributes in graph theory. One possibility would be to implement the interfaces in such a way that these attributes are stored directly at the node or edge. This has the drawback, that default values are difficult to handle. The approach in this package has the advantage that you can attach attributes to groups of elements or the whole graph so that it is for example very easy to colour all nodes at a time. For details about the attributes, please see the description of AttributeManager.