What is this type of circular-link visualization called?

Question

Does this type of chart have a name? More importantly, is there any visualization library I can use to produce it?

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2007/12/15/us/politics/DEBATE.html

Answer 1

Take a look at Circos:

Circos is a software package for visualizing data and information. It visualizes data in a circular layout — this makes Circos ideal for exploring relationships between objects or positions.

The flowing data blog also had a post on this that you might find interesting:

• Visual Representation of Tabular Information – How to Fix the Uncommunicative Table

Answer 2

I found that the dependency graph in Flare is also similar to what I want:

http://flare.prefuse.org/apps/dependency_graph

Answer 3

I would just add:

As you point out, Flare has the dependency graph, which Aleks Jakulin argued was similar but better. This was based original on the "Hierarchical Edge Bundles: Visualization of Adjacency Relations in Hierarchical Data" (Holden 2006).

I personally prefer to use Protovis to Flare directly, and you can look at Mike Bostock's example of the same graphic. Here is also an example of an Arc Diagram in Protovis, which is very similar but laid out linearly.