Gephi maps exhibited at the International Design Biennale

The Saint Étienne International Design Biennial, holding from 20 November to 5 December, is a unique event in the domain of design, due to the exhibitions shown as well as the diversity of its attendees. The Biennial democratizes design and makes it accessible to all kinds of audiences, proving that this creative discipline can take many forms, and is often driven by human aspects, including its uses by humans.

The theme of the 2010 biennial is around teleportation. It intends to explore paths of discoveries that will tend in their extreme expression to lead to a possible teleportation as the dematerialization of movement which appears to be an incredibly revealing notion of our era.

Sebastien Heymann will exhibit maps of designers’ conceptual world, placed at the center of the “Prédiction” exhibition. Made in collaboration with Benjamin Loyauté, curator of the event, these inscriptions are a proposal to reveal the state of knowledge sharing in Design today.

Useful information on how to come here.

 

You may contact Sebastien by email to appoint a meeting during the first weekend.

Ten free tickets will be given to the first comments of this post!

EDIT: photos are available on the Facebook page of Gephi.

Graph visualization on the web with Gephi and Seadragon

The project takes another big step forward and bring dynamic graph exploration on the web in one click from Gephi with the Seadragon Web Export plugin.

Mathieu Bastian and Julian Bilcke worked on a Seadragon export plugin. Directly export large graph pictures and put it on the web. Seadragon is pure Javascript and works on all modern browsers. As it uses images tiles (like Google Maps), there is no graph size limit.

Go to your Gephi installation and then to the Plugin Center (Tools > Plugin) to install the plugin. You can also download manually the plugin archive or get the source code.

/seadragon-samples/diseasome/seadragon.html

Sample with Diseasome Network dataset directly exported from Gephi

Communication about (large) graphs is currently limited because it’s not easy to put them on the web. Graph visualization has very much same aims as other types of visualization and need powerful web support. It’s a long time we are thinking about the best way to do this and found that there is no perfect solution. We need in the same time efficiency, interactivity and portability. The simpleness of making and hacking the system is also important, as we want developers to be able to improve it easily.

By comparing technologies we found that Seadragon is the best short-term solution, with minimum efforts and maximum results. It has however still a serious limitation: interactivity. No search and no click on nodes are possible for the moment. But as it is JS, I don’t see hurdles to add these features in the future, help needed.

The table below see our conclusions on technologies we are considering. We are very much eager to discuss it on the forum. As performance is the most important demand, WebGL is a serious candidate but development would require time and resources. We plan to start a WebGL visualization engine prototype next summer, for Google Summer of Code 2011, but we would like to discuss specifications with anyone interested and make this together.

	Portability	Efficiency	Effort	Interactivity
Flash
Java2D/Processing
Canvas (Processing.js/RaphaelJS)
WebGL
Seadragon

Figure: Comparing technologies able to display networks on the web.

How to use the plugin?

Install the plugin from Gephi, “Tools > Plugin” and find Seadragon Web Export. After restarting Gephi, the plugin is installed in the export menu. Load a sample network and try the plugin. Go to the Preview tab to configure the rendering settings like colors, labels and edges.

Export directly from Gephi Export menu

The settings asks for a valid directory where to export the files and the size of the canvas. Bigger is the canvas, more you can zoom in, but it takes longer time to generate and to load.

Export settings, configure the size of the image

Note that result on the local hard-drive can’t be viewed with Chrome, due to a bug. Run Chrome with “–allow-file-access-from-files” option to make it work.

Kudos to Microsoft Live Labs for this great library, released in Ms-PL open source license. Thank you to Franck Cuny for the CPAN Explorer project that inspired this plugin. Other interesting projects are GEXF Explorer, a Flash-based dynamic widget and gexf4js, load GEXF files into Protovis.

CPAN-Explorer, an interactive exploration of the Perl ecosystem

We are proud to announce the first Gephi-based system for exploring a complex network, CPAN-Explorer. This is a visualization project aiming at analyzing the relationships between the developers and the packages of the Perl language, known to be organized as the CPAN community (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network). Produced by RTGI Labs and our team, it was initially discussed in a talk at the FPW’09.

You can download original graph source files from each subproject page.
Available formats are: GEXF (Gephi graph format), GDF (Guess graph format), SVG, and PDF.
For some of the subprojects, an embedded javascript visualization is also available. For the community graph, a special Flash webpage is available for online exploration.

Website: http://www.cpan-explorer.org/

We generated two maps (authors and modules) using the CPANTS data. For the websites, we crawled a seed generated from the CPAN pages of the previous authors. Each of this graphs are generated using a force base algorithm.

All the map are available in PDF files, in creative common licence. The slides are in french, but we will explain the three maps here.

• slides (french)
• authors map
• modules map
• community map
• community map (flash version)
• cpan-explorer.org

CPAN’s modules

The first map is about the modules available on the CPAN. We selected a list of modules which are listed as dependancies by at least 10 others modules, and the modules who used them. This graph is composed of 7193 nodes (or modules) and 17510 edges. Some clusters are interesting:

• LWP and URI are really the center of the CPAN
• a lot of web modules (XML::*, TemplateToolkit, HTML::Parser, …)
• TK is isolated from the CPAN
• Moose, DBIx::Class and Catalyst are forming a group. This data are from march, we will try to do a newer version of this map this summer. This one will be really interesting as Catalyst have switched to Moose

The CPAN’s authors

This map is about the authors on the CPAN. There is about 700 authors and their connections. Each time an author use a module of another author, a link is created.

Modern Perl, constitued by Moose, Catalyst, DBIx::Class. Important authors are Steven, Sartak, perigin, jrockway, mstrout, nothingmuch, marcus ramberg

Slaven Rezić and others TK developpers are on the border

Web map

We crawled the web using the seed generated using the CPAN’s authors pages.

• again, the “modern group”, on the top of the map, with Moose/Catalyst/DBIx::Class developpers
• some enterprises, like shadowcat and iinteractive in the middle of the “modern Perl”, Booking in the middle of the YAPC’s websites (they are a major sponsor of this events), 6apart, …
• perl.org is the reference for the Perl community (the site is oriented on their sides)
• cpan.org is the reference for the open source community
• github is in the center of the Perl community. It’s widely adopted by the Perl developpers. It offers all the “social media” features that are missing on the CPAN

We hope you like this visualisations, have fun analyzing them 🙂

Thanks Franck for the original post.