Announcement Community ~ 0.7 Community roadmap

After more than four months of intense activity, and after the end of the 100-Day Plan it’s time to sum up what was achieved since the release of the 0.7 version. Most of the objectives have been carried out and Gephi has been downloaded more than 17K times since February. The future looks bright and more and more people are interested using and developing the software. Networks are gaining a lot of momentum in the research community and in the industry, by being a generic and extensible platform we position Gephi as a reference tool. If you’re interested funding us, please let us know.

To beta version

Four versions have been released and a lot of bugs have been fixed during this period. The current version is 0.7 alpha 4, released last month. New features were also developed, with the help of the developer community and were quickly deployed, for instance PDF Export and new Metrics. Not later than yesterday, new bug-fixes were deployed and available through Gephi updates.

The milestone date is also fixed for the 0.7 beta: August 14, 2010. The aim is to fix remaining bugs until this date. If you notice one, please consider reporting it.

Documentation

A Quick Start Guide and a Visualization Tutorial have been written. The community made great tutorials also, which made a huge difference. Kudos to them. The forum has also showed great ability to connect with users and provide quick support. Many efforts are still needed in that way and hope to get more support writing tutorials.

Manifesto

We completed the Gephi Manifesto, to understand the project’s goals and aims.

Communication

The video Introducing Gephi 0.7 had a huge success, viewed more than 12K times. It was done to promote the release of the 0.7 version and succeeded in this job. Gephi has now its place among graph visualization software and is already recognized for its easiness and efficiency. But above all, the audience see great potential in Gephi and many people are thinking how they could use or reuse Gephi for achieving bigger tasks. That is very positive and we are cheering developers to code plug-ins.

Follow the #madewithgephi hashtag on Twitter to see recent comments. The Gephi team also attended the IEEE EuroVis conference in June and will provide software demonstration at Sunbelt XXX next week, on Friday July 2.

Development

Thought the 0.7 beta is still in preparation, the new developments still continue and are now in a very active period. Indeed, six Google Summer of Code students are working hard and are preparing outstanding improvements. The whole code is also profiting from the toolkit project, where essential modules are built together in a single JAR in order to be reused as a Java library. Good progress is made on this project. It is very important for many developers who wants to reuse Gephi features in other Java applications. So stay tuned about GSoC updates and gephi-toolkit!

The roadmap and blueprints page also got a lifting.

We would like also to reinforce interoperability with other tools and develop connectors to new file formats.

Developers tutorials

New help pages for developers were created: Checkout Code, Configuring NetBeans and Plugin Quick Start. HowTo for extending Gephi features have been written also, including layout, metric and import and were already used by third-parties developers to create new plugins.

The next tutorial will concentrate on the gephi-toolkit project and how to reuse Gephi as a Java library.

Many other tasks are on the way, notably translating Gephi in French and Spanish and preparing Gephi Student Program. We are very interested involving CS students and propose to them challenging tasks for a semester or a quartile. We hope to interest professors about that.

One more thing, after discussing with the community members we decided to move to AGPL licence for the beta version. The GNU Affero General Public License is a modified version of the ordinary GNU GPL version 3. It has one added requirement: if you run the program on a server and let other users communicate with it there, your server must also allow them to download the source code corresponding to the program that it’s running. If what’s running there is your modified version of the program, the server’s users must get the source code as you modified it. It is specifically designed to protect the Gephi Toolkit.

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Announcement Community ~ 0.7 Community release roadmap

Gephi team is very proud to announce 0.7 version of the software, after almost one year of hard, yet passionate work. You can download and try the alpha version with various datasets. Please give us all feedback on our new forum.

Gephi is turning now in a fully collaborative free software project, as its software architecture allows collaborative development. The 0.7 project was a complete rewriting of the code in a modular way. Features were spitted in modules that can be developed and managed by different developers more easily. The Google Summer of Code 09 was a perfect way to experience our architecture. The modules developed at that time are now fully integrated in the 0.7alpha release. We plan to have many developers interested by creating plugins for Gephi. We oriented our new website in that way, have a look on the Plugin Center. Plugins could be anything, from a new layout algorithm to the connector that build graphs from your enterprise data. If you’re interested, please join the discussion on the forum.

We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive network visualization forward. Gephi’s aim is not only proposing unseen features, but above all build a professional tool that works and serve community’s needs.

Official 100-Day plan, presented as top priorities first

• Fix all reported bugs and improve usability. The 0.7 beta version will be released.
• Fill users’ Quick Start guide and create a simple tutorial how to use Gephi.
• Documentation, documentation and more documentation.
• Make a feature-madness video, to let people know us.
• Create tutorial pages for plugin development. At least layout, metrics and import.
• Fill the Plugin Portal documentation on the wiki.
• Create a Manifest and fill “Goals and Aims” on the website. Share our passion for graph visualization and highlight most challenging tasks.
• Start Gephi Student Program, by proposing a set of programming tasks that can be managed in a semester or a quartile by computer science students.
• Post blog articles about our approach and how Gephi is different (and great!).
• Reorganize 0.7 specifications and build a clear roadmap and a discussion space for future developments. Invite people to join the specification team.
• Finish documenting Gephi’s API.
• Give more insight which dataset Gephi can deal with, get closer from users’ needs by learning which networks they wants to visualize and support them in this task.

Please consider joining us for achieving these tasks! See the wiki.

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Announcement Design ~ 0.7 roadmap

I’m pleased to inform the community that we are working on a new Gephi core. As it is explained in recent news about 0.6 beta2 release, we won’t publish an official 0.6 version and move directly to an entire new architecture. Though the 0.6 architecture is pretty stable and has been used for worth case studies (see our Exhibition section or WebAtlas gallery), it doesn’t fit with various new needs, like clustering support and complete dynamic network (DNA) support. The 0.6 core was used since September 2007 from now, mostly in an experimental context. As we receive many positive comments and support, we are adopting a long term view and enter a new development cycle. When increasing quality and modularity of the application, we expect more developers helping and a lower learning curve. Therefore the new architecture will be based on the awesome Netbeans Platform, currently the most advanced open-source framework for large Java modular applications. Plugins development will be eased when based on this framework.

Besides the framework, the most serious change will be located in data structures, with a brand new technology. Developed by us for more than 6 months, the DHNS (Durable Hierarchical Network Structure) is a very efficient data structure for storing hierarchical and dynamic networks. Thanks to this new module, new hard features like a clustering algorithm framework or hierarchical network navigation could be hatched more easily. I am currently writing a paper about these researches.

Other features will be added or improved within 0.7 version, you can have a look on our 2009 roadmap. It’s hard to say now exactly how priorities will be managed but I will publish regularly news about the progress for keeping you informed. For now the top priority is building the new architecture around Netbeans Platform.

Until the end of summer, Gephi project is hosted by RTGI SAS in Paris. Besides supporting our project, they plan to use Gephi daily and thus we have feedbacks and opportunities improving user interface and ergonomics.

Let’s go back to work and build the best open-source network visualization software.

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