Introduction
Force-Directed layout algorithm for real-world large-scale undirected graphs.
Plugin Owner's Notes
It is one of the few force-directed layout algorithms that can scale to over 1 million nodes, making it ideal for large graphs. However, small graphs (hundreds or less) do not always end up looking so good. This algorithm expects undirected weighted graphs and aims to better distinguish clusters. It can be run in parallel to speed up computing.
The algorithm is originally based on Frutcherman-Reingold and works with a fixed number of iterations. The algorithm is using simulated annealing and has five different phases: liquid, expansion, cool-down, crunch, and simmer. Each stage is a fraction of the total iterations and several parameters like temperature, attraction and damping are changing. The default schedule spends approximately 25% of its time in the liquid stage, 25% in the expansion stage, 25% in the cool-down stage, 10% in the crunch stage, and 15% in the simmer stage.
The original OpenOrd C++ implementation is available at the following address : http://www.cs.sandia.gov/~smartin/software.html. This plug-in version doesn't include the multi-level version of the algorithm. The algorithm was formerly known as DrL, and before that VxOrd.
ParallelOpenOrd can be run in parallel to speed up computation. Each thread will work on a subset of the nodes of the graph. It's recommended to put the number of core minus 1 to keep a thread for display. For example on a quad-core computer, it's good to use three threads.
Edge-CuttingEdge-cutting in OpenOrd is specified using a fraction from 0 to 1. An edge-cutting value of 0 corresponds to the standard Frutcherman-Reingold layout algorithm (no cutting), while an edge-cutting value of 1 corresponds to aggressive cutting. Aggressive cutting promotes clustering but will not cut every edge. The default value for edge-cutting in OpenOrd is 0.8.
ReferenceS. Martin, W. M. Brown, R. Klavans, and K. Boyack (to appear, 2011), "OpenOrd: An Open-Source Toolbox for Large Graph Layout," SPIE Conference on Visualization and Data Analysis (VDA).
SourcesSource code is hosted on Launchpad.
Example
* 0.4 (Feb 11): Configure time spent in each stage (liquid, expansion, cool-down, crunch and simmer)
* 0.3 (Nov 10): First plugin release
5 November 2010 at 11:01 am | Permalink
Nico work you’ve done here ! It’s big step towards scalable graph layout algorithms. I hope next step will be a grid-distributed version of OpenOrd for gephi toolkit …
16 June 2011 at 3:24 am | Permalink
Hello , i need to visualize graph with 100K nodes and apply some changes to the nodes. Is there openord library for C on ubuntu?
Also i cannot download it . The download link doesn’t work
16 June 2011 at 9:31 am | Permalink
Hi,
The download link works. Anyway, you can install it directly in Gephi (menu Tools > Plugins).
13 July 2011 at 7:18 pm | Permalink
Can this be run outside of Gephi/on the command line?Thanks!
14 July 2011 at 4:04 pm | Permalink
Yes you can do that using the Gephi Toolkit (http://gephi.org/toolkit).
See how to use the Toolkit to do layout:
http://wiki.gephi.org/index.php/Toolkit_-_Layout_graph
And see how to use a plugin from the Toolkit:
http://wiki.gephi.org/index.php/How_to_use_Gephi_plug-ins_with_the_Gephi_Toolkit
Then, you can make a simple command-line Java program to do the job.
15 November 2011 at 3:25 am | Permalink
Is it possible to STEREO VISUALIZE a network with more than 100K nodes in Gephi? Thanks.
15 November 2011 at 3:57 am | Permalink
What do you mean by “stereo”?
15 November 2011 at 4:06 am | Permalink
I mean Stereoscopic (Virtual Realitiy) Visualization.
24 December 2011 at 7:26 am | Permalink
Hi everyone,
I want to do some customization on the layout. But I have no idea about the phases—-liquid, expansion, cool-down, crunch and simmer.
Is there any document that describes the algorithm?
thanks.
24 December 2011 at 11:55 am | Permalink
The paper is not freely available, but here is the link:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1117/12.871402
14 March 2012 at 9:52 am | Permalink
Hello,
I tried to download the plugin but the link doesn’t seem to work.
Any suggestion? Thanks.
14 March 2012 at 9:58 am | Permalink
The link is correct, that’s weird. Can you install the plugin from Gephi (menu Tools > Plugins)?
14 March 2012 at 11:29 am | Permalink
It worked fine, thanks
(I just had to set the right proxy port…)
22 March 2012 at 2:53 pm | Permalink
May I have the code to learn more about the Algorithms? the link http://www.cs.sandia.gov/~smartin/software.html. seems to be not available for me at the present. Can anyone help me on this?
22 March 2012 at 3:13 pm | Permalink
It is written: source code is hosted on Launchpad: https://code.launchpad.net/~gephi.team/gephi/OpenOrd-layout
6 May 2012 at 2:58 pm | Permalink
I’ve used OpenOrd Algorithm to deal with my network, and it turned out to be very pleasing result: 2 clusters that have special sinificance appeared.
To interpretation it, I have browsed related papers and one of them mentioned that Pearson Correlation Coefficient was used for clustering, but the paper “OpenOrd: An Open-Source Toolbox for Large Graph Layout” dose not tell anything about it.
I wonder what the similarity this algorithm uses for clustering?
thx!!!