Community Website ~ 0.7 documentation tutorial visualization

A new tutorial is available about Visualization in Gephi. It will guide you to the basic and advanced visualization settings in Gephi and introduce selection, interaction and tools.

Gephi has a powerful and customizable visualization engine but sometimes capabilities are not obvious and the richness of some features remains hidden. For instance text drawing is essential for visualization efficiency and needs to me controlled in the best way, in particular for large graphs.

This tutorial explains also in details some of the important tools, including:

• Shortest Path
• Heatmap
• Edit

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Community Website ~ book programming science visualization

Gephi has now its own book store!

It’s a great place for those who want to discover the key theories beyond networks. It has also an “Information Visualization” and “Programming” section for those who want to master the subject and join the Gephi team. All these books give valuable information for understanding what is guiding the people who are developing Gephi and how concepts were put in practice.

The Network Science section refers to the science beyond networks. It describes where networks are in nature, society or organizations and helps understand their properties and patterns. Newcomers can starts with Linked by Albert-Laslo Barabasi, the major reference, from 2001. You can also directly jump to Bursts, Barabasi’s new book released few days ago.

Social network theory views a network as actors who are connected by a set of relationships and is referenced as Social Network Analysis (SNA). As people increasingly use social networking websites (e.g. Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn etc.), Social Network Analysis brings tools to study patterns of communication and communities. Social Network Analysis by Wasserman & Faust is a major reference.

These books are for all audience, so researchers would find a clear state of the art of the domain with The Structure and Dynamics of Networks or Dynamical Processes of on Complex Networks.

Data Visualization and Human Computer interaction (HCI) are at the base of Gephi. Learn about how visualization and interaction enhance understanding and knowledge discovery of complex data. Information Visualization or Visual Analytics make reference to this domain as well.

One can easily find the roots of the Visual Analytics in the book Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think by Stuart Card, Jock Mackinlayis and Ben Shneiderman. Exploratory Data Analysis started with John Tukey, and has recently been extended by Andrienko.

The last stone is added with the knowledge of efficient programming, in particular how to design a modular software based on services with Practical API Design: Confessions of a Java Framework Architect. And as the human factor is central, take a look at The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering. Mathieu is a great fan

Also we foster you to go beyond with more references at the Reader’s circle and of course send us book suggestion.

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Announcement Community Events Website ~ 0.7 release spread testing

Before any further announcement about the new 0.7 version, welcome to new Gephi website, an outstanding improvement for the community. The new version 0.7alpha has been uploaded on our server today at midnight. You can download it and start playing with it now.

We would be grateful if you could send us as many feedbacks as possible, about features, bugs and usability.

To start spread Gephi, you can already visit this page. However more materials will come soon, like a feature-madness video and more screenshots.

Follow us on twitter

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Community Website ~ gexf gexfexplorer libgexf

Hi,
It’s been a while we didn’t give you some fresh news, but hopefully this fall will see great surprises for the community! First of them today, we just published a website solely dedicated to the GEXF file format and applications : http://gexf.net

You will find :

• clear GEXF specifications, examples and primer.
• libgexf, the official C++ toolkit for GEXF.
• gexfExplorer, a brand new open source Flash application created by Alexis Jacomy to visualize networks encoded in GEXF, directly in a web browser.

This website concentrates all the useful links to communicate and staying involved in these projects. They are now independent from Gephi itself, and take part of a bigger Gephi Community project.

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Website ~ gexf import support

This article discusses graph file format and introduce a new support page about graph import, which explain a bit of each format and gives tips about current Importer’s specificities.

Gephi supports major graph file format and GEXF, which is our own creation. These file format come from different editors and therefore none is really a standard. Needless to say Gephi supports them for enable previous work to be imported but it is not always easy, due to differences between them. Some standardization efforts exist but they are difficult to apply anyway, due to very different features within graph editors, for instance mixed diagrams and graphs editors.

Our approach when building the GEXF format is slightly different. Instead being specific to our software focus is made on what may be common to all network editors. In addition it will be the first standard dynamic, yet easy format. You can follow the process of specification and see some samples on this page. It recently reached a 1.1 version.

Gephi’s domain of application are networks only, this tends to clarify which data shall be imported. Although these (old) formats can have sometimes complicated functionalities, only few are essential to import a graph structure in Gephi, in sum topology and attributes.

See below current and future status about file import. Note that graph file format export is so far not a priority, as long as we have GEXF export, but we may perhaps consider it more in the future. Note that as PDF is not a graph format, export feature is set at high priority for 0.7.

Import Implementation status (Gephi 0.6 beta2)

More details and compare on Supported Graph Formats.

Future

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