  Understanding constellations in large data collections has become a common
task. One obstacle a user has to overcome is the internal complexity of these
repositories. For example, extracting connected data from a normalized
relational database requires knowledge of the table structure which might not
be available for the casual user. In this paper we present a visualization
framework which presents the collection as a set of entities and relations (on
the data level). Using rating functions, we divide large relation networks into
small graphs which resemble ego-centered networks. These graphs are connected
so the user can browse from one to another. To further assist the user, we
present two views which embed information on the evolution of the relations
into the graphs. Each view emphasizes another aspect of temporal development.
The framework can be adapted to any repository by a flexible data interface and
a graph configuration file. We present some first web-based applications
including a visualization of the DBLP data set. We use the DBLP visualization
to evaluate our approach.
