ABSTRACT
An important aspect of information visualization is the automatic placement of text or symbol labels corresponding to graphical features of drawings and maps. Labels are textual descriptions that convey information or clarify the meaning of complex structures presented in a graphical form. The automatic label placement problem is identified as an important research area by the ACM Computational Geometry Task Force [C+99]. It has applications in many areas including cartography [RMM+95], geographic information systems [Fre91], and graph drawing [DETT99].
