Gephi Consortium

Web Page: http://wiki.gephi.org/index.php/Google_Summer_Of_Code_2011

Mailing List: http://forum.gephi.org/viewforum.php?f=9

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 Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration software published in GNU AGPLv3 for all kinds of networks and relational data: online social networks, emails, communication and financial networks, but also semantic networks, inter-organizational networks and more.

Designed to make data navigation and manipulation easy, it covers the entire process from data importing to aesthetics refinements and interaction. Users interact with the visualization and manipulate structures, shapes and colors to reveal hidden properties. The goal is to help data analysts to make hypotheses and intuitively discover patterns or errors in large data collections. Gephi is built with Java SE 6 on top of the NetBeans Platform, and uses a large number of Java libraries, including JOGL for its 3-D rendering engine.

The strength of Gephi is its usability, performance, and modularity. Modules are loosely coupled, and extensible with plug-ins. Data-centered companies such as LinkedIn, Xerox, Elsevier, and many academics like the Indiana University or the library of Stanford University have already used Gephi for visualizing their data.

Gephi was officially presented at the 3rd Int'l AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM'09) conference (http://www.icwsm.org).

Past GSoC students interviews: Helder Suzuki, Jérémy Subtil

Introduction in video: http://gephi.org/2010/video-introducing-gephi-0-7/

Features: http://gephi.org/features/

Screenshots: http://gephi.org/screenshots/

Award: Oracle Duke's Choice 2010 winner http://gephi.org/2010/gephi-wins-dukes-choice-award-2010/

New in Gephi? See how to start: with the Quick Start tutorial and how to analyze your Facebook network

Further readings:

Our Manifesto / www
What we did in 2010 / www
How we started / www
How we are organized / www
What an information visualization scientist says about us / www
How it is used, for instance, to visualize the Egyptian revolution through Twitter activity / www

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Our code repository can be found here: https://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code-2011-gephi/

Projects

• A scripting plug-in for Gephi This proposal aims to develop a port of the Gython language, originally developed by the GUESS project, as a scripting plug-in with a console user interface for Gephi. The Gython language is a Domain Specific Language which is completely based on Jython and has additional operators that make it easier to handle graph structures.
• Automated build & Maven This proposal describes implementation details of converting ant based gephi to a maven based build, automating release cycle via shell scripts and creating an automated build system.
• Core Evolution - Preview Refactoring Current API in the Preview module provides too many granular methods and classes. It also lacks abstraction to how users may extend the component. We approach this problem by following a generalized visualization design model: Raw Data -> Data Tables -> Visual Structures -> Views. The interface structure in the Preview module should indicate how the API should be used. In this work, we aim to bring modularity and extensibility in the new Preview module implementation.
• Network visualization with WebGL Gephi offers great features to its users, for it to be generally useful to the public it still needs to lower the barrier to entry further, which can be done by displaying interactive graphs in web browser. With my proposal I plan to develop a WebGL-based graph rendering library with interactive controls so that users will be able to interact with graph without the need to install anything. In short, I plan to make a library that will make graphs on internet that what Google Maps did for maps.
• New Visualization Engine New visualization API will be designed and implemented altogether with user interaction, context menus and attribute modifications. New spatial data structures will be implemented to make working with node selection more transparent and to allow easy creation of plugins.
• Proposal for GSOC 2011 - Indexing Attributes API with Lucene - Gephi Consortium The aim is to use Lucene to store attributes on the disk and index them in order to be searchable. The system should have a well-designed cache system to handle heavy read access on some elements. Though the need is not as critical as the graph structure, several features in Gephi need in-memory attributes to work properly.
• Timeline player and movie creation for Gephi This document outlines a proposal to implement new features involving interaction of dynamic graphs to the open source application Gephi, in the context of the Google Summer of Code 2011 project. Following this introduction I discuss in detail the proposal, present for the development timeline and conclude with a section about my motivations and strengths for this project.