Google Summer of Code 2012

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.

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