yFiles

After extraction of the frequent patterns, we wish to graph them to find correlations between roles and permission sets. This can be done with basic data structures in any language but it would be nice to have some sort of a visual representation.

After looking at some options, we decided that yFiles offers some useful tools for representation and manipulation of graph objects. For our research, we wish to build hierarchical structures and perform some manipulations on them.

yWorks itself offers a free version of diagramming software (yEd) that is compatible with a number of graphing markup languages (graphML, xml based graph descriptions) as well as YGF, it's own graphing mark up language format. I could produce infrastructures in my code and parse them into a language that yWorks understands. However, yFiles offers classes that are compatible to yEd as well as additional graph algorithms, analysis and computation operations. The one that draws my fancy in particular is transitive closure. Shortest path might be useful for later manipulations, as a cost metric maybe?

The basic yFiles provides a subset of the available tools but for real development, you want the compete package. For usage of yFiles, Basic to Complete, the prices range from US$700 to $6000. For servers and site usage, it's just more, much much more. I personally don't have need for the source code. The package as a jar file is enough. And this is what I have. My industry sponsors have bought a couple of licenses for our use. I'm finding it quite interesting and fun right now.