take a look at the blockdiag tool www.blockdiag.com
It has ways of making network diagrams from text files and outputs the result in a few different formats (including svg)
David Lang
On Sat, 5 Apr 2014, Donn Ingle wrote:
Date: Sat, 5 Apr 2014 12:19:06 +0200 From: Donn Ingle <donn.ingle@...155...> Reply-To: Inkscape User Community inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net To: Inkscape User Community inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-user] Overlaying svg files from the commandline
Another idea is the DOT language. http://www.graphviz.org/doc/info/lang.html
Good for network diagrams with connecting lines. Afaik, it's svgable too.
Hacking svg xml is very technical too, but you can look into clones and perhaps use sed to drop sub drawings into a parent xml shell.
/d