It’s a great news, Gephi has been accepted again for Google Summer of Code. The program is the best way for students around the world to start contributing to an open-source project. The 2009 edition was a great success and dramatically boosted Gephi’s project development.
What is Gephi?
If you look around you, you may notice that networks are everywhere. For instance, social networks, relationships among people or computer networks, links between computers. Transportations routes, power grids, emails networks or the relations between scientific papers are other examples of networks. The ability to analyze, manipulate and represent a network is a key-feature for solving difficult problems and boost knowledge discovery in many disciplines.
Gephi’s project aims to bring the perfect tool for visualizing and manipulating 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 recent, the growing community is composed of a mixture of engineers and research 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:
* Shader Engine – Create a new visualization engine with OpenGL 2.0 and Shaders
* Dynamic attributes and statistics – Develop dynamic data structure and metrics framework
* Web-based network visualization engine with WebGL – Gephi on the web is starting here
* Force-Directed Edge Bundling – Work with Processing to implement this state-of-the-art datavis technique
* Data Laboratory – Code utility methods and user interface for the data manipulation
* Graph Streaming API – Create the framework for streaming graphs into Gephi in a robust way
* Direct Social Networks Import – Plug social networks data source in Gephi
You can also propose your ideas, please post on this forum topic. They will be considered and discussed by the community. Have a look on our long-term Roadmap.
Students, join the network
Students, apply now for Gephi proposals. Come to the GSOC forum section and say Hi! to this topic.
Helder Suzuki, student in 2009 wrote:
At Gephi students will have the opportunity to produce high impact work on a rapidly growing area and be noted for it.
Have a look to 2009 pages and Helder’s interview.
Gephi blog 