Community ~ gexf gexf4j
Francesco Ficarola is a Computer Engineer and a Ph.D. student at the Sapienza University of Rome. In addition he is been working for an Italian company as R&D Engineer for one year. His main research interests are Wireless Sensor Networks, Social Networking and whatever concerns “Internet of Things”.
Gephi supports the 1.2draft of GEXF file format since version 0.8. Until now, if you are a Java developer, you couldn’t use any up-to-date Java library to manage this version of the format. The only available library for building GEXF graphs was gexf4j-core v.0.2.0-ALPHA by J. Campanini. Unfortunately that library implemented GEXF 1.1draft only, and is no longer maintained. So I have decided to update that library in order to work and build GEXF 1.2draft compliant graphs. This version introduced many improvements, see the changelog.
The latest version of gexf4j (currently 0.3.1) supports new XML attributes and data types to encode dynamic networks:
- timeformat or spell
- open intervals (startopen/endopen)
- double
- date
- xsd:dateTime
In addition, the javadoc has been added and all methods have now meaningful names for their parameters.
Creating a GEXF file with gexf4j is very simple and requires very few lines of code: read the two examples in the project README file, or find them in the “it.uniroma1.dis.wiserver.gexf4j.examples” project package.
Finally, if you would like to support this project, please let me know, you are welcome… and if you want to stay informed about the latest news on gexf4j, just follow me on Twitter: @f_ficarola
Checkout code
Run
git clone git://github.com/francesco-ficarola/gexf4j.git
Report issues
Simply go to the Issues tab.
Have a nice “GEXF graph”!
Francesco Ficarola
Community ~ news
We started the weekly news in March, however this experiment was discontinuous. We come back with monthly news, to give the important news to the people who don’t have a Twitter account or who don’t connect to it each regularly.
Job offering:
New plugin:
Next community events:
New Web articles:
New research papers:
- F. Celli, L. Rossi: The Role of Emotional Stability in Twitter Conversations, Proceedings of the Workshop on Semantic Analysis in Social Media, part of the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2012)
- P. Oldham, S. Hall, G. Burton: Synthetic Biology: Mapping the Scientific Landscape, PLoS ONE 7(4): e34368
- J. Lee et al.: Social Network Based Reputation Computation and Document Classification, Journal of Universal Computer Science, vol. 18, no. 4 (2012), 532-553
- C. Horsethief: Re-differentiation as collective intelligence: The Ktunaxa language online community, CI2012
- J. Jerkins: MINA: an algorithm for detecting the presence of extrinsic network nodes using a message induced graph, Proceedings of the 50th Annual Southeast Regional Conference (ACM-SE’12)
- B. Latour, P. Jensen, T. Venturini, S. Grauwin, D. Boullier: The Whole is Always Smaller Than Its Parts, British Journal of Sociology
- M. Fatemi, L. Tokarchuk: An Empirical Study on IMDb and its Communities Based on the Network of Co-Reviewers, Proceedings of MPM’12
- Z. Batist: Feasting in Bronze Age Greece: A Network Analysis Approach, Bachelor of Arts, Carleton University
- M. Turalska, E. Geneston, B.J. West, P. Allegrini, and P. Grigolini: Cooperation-Induced Topological Complexity: A Promising Road to Fault Tolerance and Hebbian Learning, Front Physiol. 2012; 3: 52
- J. Kelly, V. Barash, K. Alexanyan, B. Etling, R. Faris, U. Gasser, J. Palfrey: Mapping Russian Twitter, Berkman Center Research Publication No. 2012-3
- T. Vinodrai et al.: Taking regional action? Understanding networks in the local food, green energy & creative sectors in Waterloo region, Economic Developers Council of Ontario (EDCO)
- J. Devezas, H. Alves, A. Figueir: Creating News Context From a Folksonomy of Web Clipping, ICDMA2012
- L. Gilarranz, J. Bascompte: Spatial network structure and metapopulation persistence, Journal of Theoretical Biology, 297: 11-16
Announcement Community ~ gsoc
The Google Summer of Code 2012 has officially started! The results have been announced by Google. Congratulations to the students who join the Gephi project:
- Eduardo Espinoza – Legend Module in Preview
- Romain Yon – Cloud Gephi
- Taras Klaskovsky – Force Directed Edge Bundling algorithm
- Vikash Anand – Statistics Reports and HTML5 Charts
- Min WU – Interconnect Graph Streaming API and GraphStream
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!
This year we are also honored to count on world-class researchers as mentors: Yoann Pigné is an Assistant Professor at the university of Le Havre, France, and is a leader of the GraphStream project. We will co-mentor the Graph Streaming project with André Panisson, our former Google Summer of Code student. André got his Ph.D. recently, and authored the video of the Egyptian Revolution on Twitter. Finally, Christian Tominski, who mentored the Preview refactoring last year, will mentor the Force Directed Edge Bundling project. He is a Lecturer and Researcher at the Institute for Computer Science at the University of Rostock. He has authored several articles in the field of information visualization.
Former Google Summer of Code students will also mentor and advise students, like Luiz Ribeiro.
* Until May 21: Students get to know mentors, read documentation, get up to speed to begin working on their projects.
* May 21: Students starts to code
* July 13: Mid-term evaluation
* August 24: Final evaluation
Announcement Community ~ gsoc
It’s a great news, Gephi has been accepted again for the Google Summer of Code. The program is the best way for students around the world to start contributing to an open-source project. Since 2009, each edition is a great success and dramatically boosted Gephi’s project development.
What is Gephi?
Networks are everywhere: email systems, financial transaction systems and gene-protein interaction networks are just a few examples. Gephi began as a university student project four years ago and has quickly become an open source software leader in the visualization and analysis of large networks. It is an important contribution to the ecosystem of tools used by researchers and big data analysts to explore and extract value from the deluge of relational data and disseminate a better understanding for people to think about a “connected” world.
Gephi is a “Photoshop” for graphs: designed to make data navigation and manipulation easy, it covers the entire process from data importing to aesthetics refinements and communication. Users interact with the visualization and manipulate structures, shapes and colors to reveal the properties of complex and messy data. The goal is to help data analysts make hypotheses and intuitively discover patterns or errors in large data collections.
Gephi’s project aims at providing the perfect tool to visualize and analyze networks. We focus on usability, performance and modularity:
- Usability: Easy to install, an UI without scripts and real-time manipulation.
- Performance: Visualization engine and data structures are built scalable. Supporting always-larger graphs is an endless challenge!
- Modularity: Extensible software architecture, built on top of Netbeans Platform. Add plug-ins with ease.
Learn more about Gephi, watch Introducing Gephi 0.7, download and try it by following Quick Start Tutorial.
Gephi’s project is young, the growing community is composed of engineers and scientists involved in network science, datavis and complex networks.
List of ideas
List of ideas are availabe on our wiki. They cover various skills and level of difficulties:
* Legend module – Integrate a legend in the Preview module
* Flexible Table Importer – Create a generic network creation wizard from data tables
* Cloud Gephi – Build an online gallery and bring some of Gephi’s features to the cloud
* Force Directed Edge Bundling – Implement Force Directed Edge Bundling algorithm
* Statistics Reports and HTML5 Charts – Improve statistic report and port existing charts to HTML5+Javascript
* Statistics Unit Tests – Add unit tests to the statistical algorithms
* Graph Streaming – Improve Graph Streaming API and interconnect GraphStream’s dynamic graph event model with Gephi
Please also propose your ideas on the forum. They will be considered and discussed by the community. Have a look at our long-term Roadmap.
Students, join the network
Students, apply now for Gephi proposals. Join us on the forum and fill in the questionnaire. Be careful, deadline for submitting proposals is April 6 (timeline)!
Hélder Suzuki, student for Gephi in 2009 and now software engineer at Google, wrote:
At Gephi students will have the opportunity to produce high impact work on a rapidly growing area and be noted for it.
View our previous Google Summer of Code projects here and read former students interviews.
Follow Gephi on Twitter
Community ~ gsoc
This post was originally posted on the Google Open Source blog by Sébastien Heymann, co-founder of the Gephi project and Google Summer of Code administrator.
Networks are everywhere: email systems, financial transaction systems and gene-protein interaction networks are just a few examples. Gephi began as a university student project four years ago and has quickly become an open source software leader in the visualization and analysis of large networks. It is an important contribution to the ecosystem of tools used by researchers and big data analysts to explore and extract value from the deluge of relational data and disseminate a better understanding for people to think about a “connected” world.
Gephi is a “Photoshop” for such data: designed to make data navigation and manipulation easy, it covers the entire process from data importing to aesthetics refinements and communication. Users interact with the visualization and manipulate structures, shapes and colors to reveal the properties of complex and messy data. The goal is to help data analysts make hypotheses and intuitively discover patterns or errors in large data collections.
Our success was made much faster thanks to the Google Summer of Code. The timing of our acceptance into our first Google Summer of Code in 2009 was perfect: we were at the point where we could make the project really open in the way our infrastructure could scale code, and our human organization was ready to welcome contributors. Participating in the program gave us a boost of fame helping us promote the project and created an international community for Gephi.
We met many people and learned a lot, but this is the most important lesson to share: though students are paid stipends for their work during the program, money should not be the first incentive. To encourage students to stick with the project, we talk with each of them to find their deeper motivations in working on Gephi and try and develop a win-win situation. And it works! Many of the students continue to contribute to the project for at least a few months after the end of the Google Summer of Code program, and others have gone on to become members of our team.
We recognize this long-term investment by promoting their work, like André Panisson who released a plug-in in 2010, which connects Gephi to a graph stream and visualizes it in real-time. André made this amazing video of the Egyptian Revolution on Twitter, when he monitored the hashtag #jan25. More recently, Martin Škurla presented his work at FOSDEM 2012 and talked about his plug-in which connects Gephi to the graph database Neo4j. He started his project during the Google Summer of Code 2010 and continued his work until the release. We really appreciated the effort, so the Gephi Consortium and Neo Technologies Inc. paid his expenses to attend the conference. Finally, I must talk about Eduardo Ramos, who we rejected as a student two years ago for Google Summer of Code but who was so motivated that he decided to contribute to Gephi anyway, becoming one of the project leaders, a Google Summer of Code mentor… and a friend!
To learn more about Gephi, watch our madness screencast and view our previous Google Summer of Code projects here. Want to apply for Gephi? Join us on the forum.
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