It sounds cliche, but I've found the yEd graph editor crucial in reading a Dostoevsky novel and keeping up with all the characters and their relations. Is yworks pretty much the only game in town when it comes to graph editing?
chart recognition and OCR in general would make UGC sites, in particular wikipedia, much more powerful. wikipedia is full of uploaded charts that should be datasets.<p>in general chart sharing on the web is bad. If we can't have a <chart> element, maybe chart parsing is the next best thing to preserve some of the original information
yWorks employee, developer and one of the authors of that blog post (and the described code) here. Happy to answer any questions regarding graph drawing or recognition.
The title led to be believe this would be about extracting relational hierarchies (e.g. scene trees, dependency graphs) from arbitrary images. That would have been very impressive, and somewhat unbelievable. The actual article appears to be about extracting graphs from images of literal graphs.