Gephi

Gephi is an open source software for exploring data structures as networks, called complex systems or graphs from a mathematical point of view. This kind of modeling is used in many fields of research and concrete issues. For instance, social networks, relationships among people or computer networks, links between computers. Transportations routes, power grids, epidemic spread, 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.
Innovation
This is a tool for people that have to explore and understand graphs. Like Photoshop but for data, the user interacts with the representation, manipulate the structures, shapes and colors to reveal hidden properties. The goal is to help data analysts to make hypothesis, intuitively discover patterns, isolate structure singularities or faults during data sourcing. It is a complementary tool to traditional statistics, as visual thinking with interactive interfaces is now recognized to facilitate reasoning. This is a software for Exploratory Data Analysis , a paradigm appeared in the Visual Analytics field of research.
It uses a 3D render engine to display large networks in real-time and to speed up the exploration. A flexible and multi-task architecture brings new possibilities to work with complex data sets and produce valuable visual results.
History
Gephi was originally created in 2007 at WebAtlas, a French NGO involved in Web mapping and data mining. Now, it is developed by Gephi NGO, an international consortium of open source developers. Gephi was initially made public in April, 2009 (v0.6b3).
Development
The Gephi core developer team continues to work on this project and in the near future, is going to release next major version, Gephi 0.7. It will be a more modularized, expandable and maintainable version of Gephi, based on NetBeans platform. For more information about version 0.7, see the roadmap.
Usage
Gephi deals with all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs. It is commonly used to analyze web communities structure, social networks and bibliometric data, but may be directly used on biological networks, infrastructure networks and others. This software is also specifically used to create printable data cartographies.
The modular architecture allows to easily create plugins to extend the features, and share it with the community through the plugins center.
Features
* Real-time visualization of unlimited number of nodes and edges, depending on the machine; Zoom in/out and pan for browsing the network.
* Tools: interacting on elements, like finding a shortest path between two nodes.
* Layouts: force-based algorithms (Fruchterman Reingold, ForceAtlas) and multi-level algorithms / graph coarsening (Yifan Hu).
* Metrics: betweenness, closeness, diameter, clustering coefficient, average shortest path, PageRank, HITS, community detection (modularity), random generators.
* Dynamic network analysis: temporal file format, timeline.
* Data cartography: fine tuning of colors, size and labels to bring sense to the network representation; Vectorial export in SVG.
* Clustering: attribute-based or built-in clustering, hierarchical graph exploration.
* Dynamic filtering: complex filter query visually (without scripting), saving favorite queries.
* Work organization: different workspaces for different graphs or processing, saved in a session file.
* Modular: API for extensible features, very little work to add new connectors or external data source.
* Extensions: built-in Plugins Center.

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