ABSTRACT
Traditionally, the placement of labels has been central in the framework of cartography. Today, due to the significant growth in the area of information visualization the placement of labels may be seen through a wider scope. Labels are textual descriptions, and thus another means to convey information or clarify the meaning of complex structures. The problem of automatic label placement is important [1], and has applications in many areas including information visualization [2], cartography [3], geographic information science (GIS) [4], and graph drawing [5,6].
