Gephi road map, Summer 2021

This road map states, in short, Gephi’s priorities, long-term and short-term goals, challenges in various areas, and way to go.

Project vision

Gephi is multiplatform, open source, installable, extensible by the community, and with local-based files.

Gephi is an opinionated take on network analysis, and is not intended to be the only network analysis tool. Its focus is visual interaction, and a scalable workflow from 10 to 10,000,000 nodes (assuming enough computing power). Its core features are visualizing, filtering networks, and computing statistics. Gephi is exploration-oriented: visualize primarily for yourself, secondarily for others. More info on the community of Gephi users in this post.

Priorities

1. Sustainability. Notably maintenance: Gephi needs to work before anything else. This includes: being easy to install (including Java) on all platforms, having the UI work in various screen resolutions and sizes, stability, fix major bugs, and have a sufficiently clear and documented codebase that multiple developers can understand it and contribute.
2. Version 1.0, i.e. current Gephi with a consolidated set of features. We want to release a coherent version of today’s Gephi before discussing new directions to explore.
3. Stabilizing core contributors. This entails institutional support, fundraising, and discussing governance.
4. Other. Community tools and online presence (forum, website…). Plugins. Web integration (Gephi JS). Evolution of Gephi. Documentation, tutorials and teaching material. Dev community (code examples). Keeping Gephi state-of-the-art over the long term.

Project road map

Until Winter 2021: Gephi dev campaign.

Goal: enrol new developers in the project.

Fall 2021: Gephi codebase sustainability retreat.

Goal: train new Gephi developers, iterate over the technical road map to Gephi 1.0 and discuss its implementation. Set concrete sustainability goals for 2022.

We will invite ~5 developers for a 1-week code retreat in Copenhagen, compensation 100€/day.

2022: Fundraising for Gephi v1.0

Goal: explore opportunities, small (Google Summer of Code, Outreachy) and big (institutional funding, crowdfunding).

2022: Reach Gephi’s sustainability goals

Goal: make Gephi sustainable again.

Fall 2022: Gephi codebase sustainability retreat, 2nd edition

Goal: train new Gephi developers and iterate over the technical road map to Gephi 1.0

2022-2023: prepare and release Gephi V1.0

Goal: get through Gephi’s technical road map to version 1.0, with the help of the newly trained developers, and the funding. Release Gephi 1.0.

2023: Gephi 1.0 workshop

Goal: celebrate the release of Gephi 1.0. Recruit new contributors. Iterate over the road map. Prepare the future.

Technical road map to Gephi 1.0

This technical road map was largely established in 2018, more on that in this post. Additionally, design guidelines presented in that post.

• UNDO feature, limited to the “GEXF scope”: network data, metadata, positions, sizes, colors…
• Default save to GEXF. More stable than “.gephi” though it does not save the state of the user interface.
• Activity log, possibly coordinated to undo, possibly stored in the GEXF. A plugin is already exploring that direction.
• Parallel edges. The GraphStore supports it but not the rest of Gephi.
• New OpenGL engine. Eduardo already prototyped it. It is better but also solves maintenance issues.
• Curved edges in visual exploration. These are important because they help identifying edge orientation.
• Quick search in nodes and metadata. It turns out it should be pretty easy to implement.
• New icons. Many resources are now available to do better and the technical part is trivial.
• Cleaner data laboratory
• Update to the latest Netbeans Platform
• Embed Java: no more hassle with installing the right Java version.
• Install from MacStore. Easier for Mac users.
• Fix filter composition.
• Revamp appearance (label color & size, sliders). For instance incentivize rankings as opposed to default unitary mode.
• GDPR compliance (bug reports contain PII at the moment)
• Logging (much more logs to facilitate debugging from crash reports)
• Instrumentation (opt-in statistics about feature usage and crashes)
• Unit testing (Gephi codebase has 0 unit tests, only Graphstore. Cover the basics like .gephi i/o, filters…)
• Better statistics reports in HTML5.
• Label anchor (start, middle, end)… and possibly some jitter.
• Better label adjust (one that works better). Possibly with label jitter.