White Paper on Drawing Strategies

White Paper on Drawing Strategies

COURTESY :- vrindawan.in

Wikipedia

A white paper is a report or guide that informs readers concisely about a complex issue and presents the issuing body’s philosophy on the matter. It is meant to help readers understand an issue, solve a problem, or make a decision. A white paper is the first document researchers should read to better understand a core concept or idea.

The term originated in the 1920s to mean a type of position paper or industry report published by some department of the UK government.

Since the 1990s, this type of document has proliferated in business. Today, a business-to-business (B2B) white paper is closer to a marketing presentation, a form of content meant to persuade customers and partners and promote a certain product or viewpoint. That makes B2B white papers a type of grey literature.

The term white paper originated with the British government and many point to the Churchill White Paper of 1922 as the earliest well-known example under this name. Gertrude Bell, the British explorer and diplomat, was possibly the first woman to write a white paper. Her 149-page report was entitled “Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia” and was presented to Parliament in 1920. In the British government, a white paper is usually the less extensive version of the so-called blue book, both terms being derived from the colour of the document’s cover.

White papers are a “tool of participatory democracy … not [an] unalterable policy commitment”. “White papers have tried to perform the dual role of presenting firm government policies while at the same time inviting opinions upon them.

In Canada, a white paper is “a policy document, approved by Cabinet, tabled in the House of Commons and made available to the general public”. The “provision of policy information through the use of white and green papers can help to create an awareness of policy issues among parliamentarians and the public and to encourage an exchange of information and analysis. They can also serve as educational techniques.”

White papers are a way the government can present policy preferences before it introduces legislation. Publishing a white paper tests public opinion on controversial policy issues and helps the government gauge its probable impact.

By contrast, green papers, which are issued much more frequently, are more open-ended. Also known as consultation documents, green papers may merely propose a strategy to implement in the details of other legislation, or they may set out proposals on which the government wishes to obtain public views and opinion.

Examples of governmental white papers include, in Australia, the White Paper on Full Employment and, in the United Kingdom, the White Paper of 1939 and the 1966 Defence White Paper.

In Israeli history, the White Paper of 1939 – marking a sharp turn against Zionism in British policy and at the time greeted with great anger by the Jewish Yishuv community in Mandatory Palestine – is remembered as “The White Paper” (in Hebrew Ha’Sefer Ha’Lavan הספר הלבן – literally “The White Book”).

Graph drawing is an area of mathematics and computer science combining methods from geometric graph theory and information visualization to derive two-dimensional depictions of graphs arising from applications such as social network analysis, cartography, linguistics, and bioinformatics.

A drawing of a graph or network diagram is a pictorial representation of the vertices and edges of a graph. This drawing should not be confused with the graph itself: very different layouts can correspond to the same graph. In the abstract, all that matters is which pairs of vertices are connected by edges. In the concrete, however, the arrangement of these vertices and edges within a drawing affects its under stand ability, usability, fabrication cost, and aesthetics. The problem gets worse if the graph changes over time by adding and deleting edges (dynamic graph drawing) and the goal is to preserve the user’s mental map.

Graphs are frequently drawn as node–link diagrams in which the vertices are represented as disks, boxes, or textual labels and the edges are represented as line segments, poly lines, or curves in the Euclidean plane. Node–link diagrams can be traced back to the 14th-16th century works of Pseudo-Lull which were published under the name of Ramon Llull, a 13th century polymath. Pseudo-Lull drew diagrams of this type for complete graphs in order to analyze all pairwise combinations among sets of metaphysical concepts.

In the case of directed graphs, arrowheads form a commonly used graphical convention to show their orientation; however, user studies have shown that other conventions such as tapering provide this information more effectively. Upward planar drawing uses the convention that every edge is oriented from a lower vertex to a higher vertex, making arrowheads unnecessary.

Alternative conventions to node–link diagrams include adjacency representations such as circle packings, in which vertices are represented by disjoint regions in the plane and edges are represented by adjacencies between regions; intersection representations in which vertices are represented by non-disjoint geometric objects and edges are represented by their intersections; visibility representations in which vertices are represented by regions in the plane and edges are represented by regions that have an unobstructed line of sight to each other; confluent drawings, in which edges are represented as smooth curves within mathematical train tracks; fabrics, in which nodes are represented as horizontal lines and edges as vertical lines; and visualizations of the adjacency matrix of the graph.

Many different quality measures have been defined for graph drawings, in an attempt to find objective means of evaluating their aesthetics and usability. In addition to guiding the choice between different layout methods for the same graph, some layout methods attempt to directly optimize these measures.

• The crossing number of a drawing is the number of pairs of edges that cross each other. If the graph is planar, then it is often convenient to draw it without any edge intersections; that is, in this case, a graph drawing represents a graph embedding. However, nonplanar graphs frequently arise in applications, so graph drawing algorithms must generally allow for edge crossings.
• The area of a drawing is the size of its smallest bounding box, relative to the closest distance between any two vertices. Drawings with smaller area are generally preferable to those with larger area, because they allow the features of the drawing to be shown at greater size and therefore more legibly. The aspect ratio of the bounding box may also be important.
• Symmetry display is the problem of finding symmetry groups within a given graph, and finding a drawing that displays as much of the symmetry as possible. Some layout methods automatically lead to symmetric drawings; alternatively, some drawing methods start by finding symmetries in the input graph and using them to construct a drawing.
• It is important that edges have shapes that are as simple as possible, to make it easier for the eye to follow them. In polyline drawings, the complexity of an edge may be measured by its number of bends, and many methods aim to provide drawings with few total bends or few bends per edge. Similarly for spline curves the complexity of an edge may be measured by the number of control points on the edge.
• Several commonly used quality measures concern lengths of edges: it is generally desirable to minimize the total length of the edges as well as the maximum length of any edge. Additionally, it may be preferable for the lengths of edges to be uniform rather than highly varied.
• Angular resolution is a measure of the sharpest angles in a graph drawing. If a graph has vertices with high degree then it necessarily will have small angular resolution, but the angular resolution can be bounded below by a function of the degree.
• The slope number of a graph is the minimum number of distinct edge slopes needed in a drawing with straight line segment edges (allowing crossings). Cubic graphs have slope number at most four, but graphs of degree five may have unbounded slope number; it remains open whether the slope number of degree-4 graphs is bounded.
• In force-based layout systems, the graph drawing software modifies an initial vertex placement by continuously moving the vertices according to a system of forces based on physical metaphors related to systems of springs or molecular mechanics. Typically, these systems combine attractive forces between adjacent vertices with repulsive forces between all pairs of vertices, in order to seek a layout in which edge lengths are small while vertices are well-separated. These systems may perform gradient descent based minimization of an energy function, or they may translate the forces directly into velocities or accelerations for the moving vertices.
• Spectral layout methods use as coordinates the eigenvectors of a matrix such as the Laplacian derived from the adjacency matrix of the graph.
• Orthogonal layout methods, which allow the edges of the graph to run horizontally or vertically, parallel to the coordinate axes of the layout. These methods were originally designed for VLSI and PCB layout problems but they have also been adapted for graph drawing. They typically involve a multiphase approach in which an input graph is planarized by replacing crossing points by vertices, a topological embedding of the planarized graph is found, edge orientations are chosen to minimize bends, vertices are placed consistently with these orientations, and finally a layout compaction stage reduces the area of the drawing.
• Tree layout algorithms these show a rooted tree-like formation, suitable for trees. Often, in a technique called “balloon layout”, the children of each node in the tree are drawn on a circle surrounding the node, with the radii of these circles diminishing at lower levels in the tree so that these circles do not overlap.
• Layered graph drawing methods (often called Sugiyama-style drawing) are best suited for directed acyclic graphs or graphs that are nearly acyclic, such as the graphs of dependencies between modules or functions in a software system. In these methods, the nodes of the graph are arranged into horizontal layers using methods such as the Coff man–Graham algorithm, in such a way that most edges go downwards from one layer to the next; after this step, the nodes within each layer are arranged in order to minimize crossings.In the field of management, strategic management involves the formulation and implementation of the major goals and initiatives taken by an organization’s managers on behalf of stakeholders, based on consideration of resources and an assessment of the internal and external environments in which the organization operates. Strategic management provides overall direction to an enterprise and involves specifying the organization’s objectives, developing policies and plans to achieve those objectives, and then allocating resources to implement the plans. Academics and practicing managers have developed numerous models and frameworks to assist in strategic decision-making in the context of complex environments and competitive dynamics. Strategic management is not static in nature; the models can include a feedback loop to monitor execution and to inform the next round of planning.

  Michael Porter identifies three principles underlying strategy:

  • creating a “unique and valuable [market] position”
  • making trade-offs by choosing “what not to do”
  • creating “fit” by aligning company activities with one another to support the chosen strategy

  Corporate strategy involves answering a key question from a portfolio perspective: “What business should we be in?” Business strategy involves answering the question: “How shall we compete in this business?

   

  Management theory and practice often make a distinction between strategic management and operational management, with operational management concerned primarily with improving efficiency and controlling costs within the boundaries set by the organization’s strategy.

  Strategy is defined as “the determination of the basic long-term goals of an enterprise, and the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary for carrying out these goals. Strategies are established to set direction, focus effort, define or clarify the organization, and provide consistency or guidance in response to the environment.

  Strategic management involves the related concepts of strategic planning and strategic thinking. Strategic planning is analytical in nature and refers to formalized procedures to produce the data and analyses used as inputs for strategic thinking, which synthesizes the data resulting in the strategy. Strategic planning may also refer to control mechanisms used to implement the strategy once it is determined. In other words, strategic planning happens around the strategic thinking or strategy making activity.

  Strategic management is often described as involving two major processes: formulation and implementation of strategy. While described sequentially below, in practice the two processes are iterative and each provides input for the other.

  Formulation of strategy involves analyzing the environment in which the organization operates, then making a series of strategic decisions about how the organization will compete. Formulation ends with a series of goals or objectives and measures for the organization to pursue. Environmental analysis includes the:

  • Remote external environment, including the political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental landscape (PESTLE);
  • Industry environment, such as the competitive behavior of rival organizations, the bargaining power of buyers/customers and suppliers, threats from new entrants to the industry, and the ability of buyers to substitute products (Porter’s 5 forces); and
  • Internal environment, regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the organization’s resources (i.e., its people, processes and IT systems).

  Strategic decisions are based on insight from the environmental assessment and are responses to strategic questions about how the organization will compete, such as:

  • What is the organization’s business?
  • Who is the target customer for the organization’s products and services?
  • Where are the customers and how do they buy? What is considered “value” to the customer?
  • Which businesses, products and services should be included or excluded from the portfolio of offerings?
  • What is the geographic scope of the business?
  • What differentiates the company from its competitors in the eyes of customers and other stakeholders?
  • Which skills and capabilities should be developed within the firm?
  • What are the important opportunities and risks for the organization?
  • How can the firm grow, through both its base business and new business?
  • How can the firm generate more value for investors?

  The answers to these and many other strategic questions result in the organization’s strategy and a series of specific short-term and long-term goals or objectives and related measures.

  The second major process of strategic management is implementation, which involves decisions regarding how the organization’s resources (i.e., people, process and IT systems) will be aligned and mobilized towards the objectives. Implementation results in how the organization’s resources are structured (such as by product or service or geography), leadership arrangements, communication, incentives, and monitoring mechanisms to track progress towards objectives, among others.

  Running the day-to-day operations of the business is often referred to as “operations management” or specific terms for key departments or functions, such as “logistics management” or “marketing management,” which take over once strategic management decisions are implemented.