Announcement Plugins ~ canvas interactive exploration map plugin seadragon web webgl

The project takes another big step forward and bring dynamic graph exploration on the web in one click from Gephi with the Seadragon Web Export plugin.

Mathieu Bastian and Julian Bilcke worked on a Seadragon export plugin. Directly export large graph pictures and put it on the web. Seadragon is pure Javascript and works on all modern browsers. As it uses images tiles (like Google Maps), there is no graph size limit.

Go to your Gephi installation and then to the Plugin Center (Tools > Plugin) to install the plugin. You can also download manually the plugin archive or get the source code.

Communication about (large) graphs is currently limited because it’s not easy to put them on the web. Graph visualization has very much same aims as other types of visualization and need powerful web support. It’s a long time we are thinking about the best way to do this and found that there is no perfect solution. We need in the same time efficiency, interactivity and portability. The simpleness of making and hacking the system is also important, as we want developers to be able to improve it easily.

By comparing technologies we found that Seadragon is the best short-term solution, with minimum efforts and maximum results. It has however still a serious limitation: interactivity. No search and no click on nodes are possible for the moment. But as it is JS, I don’t see hurdles to add these features in the future, help needed.

The table below see our conclusions on technologies we are considering. We are very much eager to discuss it on the forum. As performance is the most important demand, WebGL is a serious candidate but development would require time and resources. We plan to start a WebGL visualization engine prototype next summer, for Google Summer of Code 2011, but we would like to discuss specifications with anyone interested and make this together.

How to use the plugin?

Install the plugin from Gephi, “Tools > Plugin” and find Seadragon Web Export. After restarting Gephi, the plugin is installed in the export menu. Load a sample network and try the plugin. Go to the Preview tab to configure the rendering settings like colors, labels and edges.

Export directly from Gephi Export menu

The settings asks for a valid directory where to export the files and the size of the canvas. Bigger is the canvas, more you can zoom in, but it takes longer time to generate and to load.

Export settings, configure the size of the image

Note that result on the local hard-drive can’t be viewed with Chrome, due to a bug. Run Chrome with “–allow-file-access-from-files” option to make it work.

Kudos to Microsoft Live Labs for this great library, released in Ms-PL open source license. Thank you to Franck Cuny for the CPAN Explorer project that inspired this plugin. Other interesting projects are GEXF Explorer, a Flash-based dynamic widget and gexf4js, load GEXF files into Protovis.

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Announcement ~ developer java toolkit tutorial

We are announcing today the first release of the Gephi Toolkit. The Toolkit project packages essential modules (Graph, Layout, Filters, IO…) in a standard Java library, which any Java project can use for getting things done. The toolkit is just a single JAR that anyone could reuse in a Java program and script Gephi features.

The toolkit is the counterpart of the desktop application. Gephi’s user interface aims to be simple, intuitive and without command-line or scripting needed. The toolkit is made for people who want to:

• Script, automate features & reproduce the same procedure over and over
• Reuse Gephi features and algorithms in other projects and softwares
• Develop all types of mashups or web-services that deals with networks

A lot of new content is coming with the release of the Toolkit. A new portal appeared on the wiki, with documentation. Above all we provide demos and examples and a tutorial for newcomers. The cool thing is that it is very easy to use and this is all compatible with Gephi plugins. What is done for Gephi desktop can be reused in the toolkit.

Gephi is designed in a modular way and splitted into different modules. All features are wrapped into separated modules, for instance a module for the graph structure, a module for the layout algorithms and so on. Moreover business modules are separated from user interfaces modules. That allows to keep only business modules and remove UI without any problems. That is the purpose of the toolkit, which wraps only core modules and removes all the UI layer. So the toolkit is just taking what already exists in Gephi and packages it.

That is all thanks to the power of Java and Netbeans Platform.  The way modular development is encouraged and the ability to manually extract modules from the Netbeans Platform is all thanks to the way they designed the architecture and use standards like ‘ant’ and plain Java. It’s a good occasion to say Kudos to them!

With the release of the toolkit, we are also moving to the AGPL license, as announced earlier. 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.

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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 Functionality ~ 0.7 release

The alpha4 version has just been released, check out Download page or Check for Updates in your Gephi. This release comes with new features, including PDF export and bugfixes. Thank you to all members that reported bugs on the forum or through the Crash reporter, that helps a lot, more than you think!

Many bugs have been fixed, including the Menubar problem on Mac OS X and some annoying filters issues.

Let’s have a look on what’s new, and read the complete release notes.

PDF Export

The built-in PDF Exporter is now fully working. It exports the network exactly how it’s displayed in the “Preview” window. We have been impressed how fast it’s processing and exporting. One can configure the page size and margins, in addition to the orientation. Thus you can directly export your network and embed or print it anywhere. Note that texts in PDF are searchable, very useful. Special thanks to Jeremy Subtil who worked on his free time on this feature.

GraphML Export

Files in GraphML format can now be exported from Gephi. Interoperability is very important and the GraphML format is well known and supported in other tools such NodeXL, igraph or NetworkX. We hope that we reach interoperability with these tools and that we use GraphML in the same way. If not, please let us know.

Ego Network

A new filter has been created, it let’s you filter the graph from a node at depth 1, 2, 3 or Max. Enter a node label and the depth and it shows the network around this node.

Other new features in this release

• CSV export – Export adjacency list and matrix
• New LabelAdjust algorithm, faster and better quality. Thanks to Mathieu Jacomy.
• Watts-Strogatz Small World Generator

Interested by being a Gephi official tester? Please consider joining the community.

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Announcement Community ~ gsoc

The Google Summer of Code 2010 is officially launched! Results have been announced by Google yesterday. Congratulations to the students that are joining Gephi project:

• André Panisson – Graph Streaming API
• Antonio Patriarca – Shader Engine
• Cezary Bartosiak – Dynamic attributes and statistics
• Christopher Kelvin Lee – Force-Directed Edge Bundling
• Martin Škurla – Adding support for Neo4j in Gephi
• Yi Du – Direct Social Networks Import

You put a lot of attention on doing the bests applications and demonstrate great motivation in addition to strong technical skills. We are very excited to work with you guys!

The Summer Timeline:

* Until May 24: Students get to know mentors, read documentation, get up to speed to begin working on their projects.
* May 24: Students starts to code
* July 16: Mid-term evaluation
* August 16: Pencils down

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