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Hi everyone, I am interested in exploring the relationship in a network visualisation map between the users in my twitter account, I have found a couple of these online toolkit but can't seems to find any tools/open source software for that task. Does anyone have any experience to share? I tried Networkx package for python but it does not work on my pc and mac unfortunately..... Regards, Andy. |
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The three that I know of off the top of my head are: Pajek is sort of the "original" and has been around forever. In my experience, it handles large networks fairly well, but its visualizations are not as pretty as the others and it is still only available for Widnows. Cytoscape is the next-most-mature. Because it is in Java, it can work on any system but also can take a lot of memory. Unlike Pajek, it does not have a lot of common computations (i.e. shortest paths, clustering coefficients) "built in", but it has an active user community with a lot of plugins, so chances are you will be able to find what you need. Also, it has gotten a lot better over the years in terms of scaling, and tends to produce pretty visualizations if you know what you're doing. Ora is relatively new. I don't have much experience with it, but the pictures I have seen are very pretty. I doubt that it scales as well as Cytoscape, but some of its functionality is easier to use (i.e. conditional coloring of edges and conditional hiding of edges). I hope this helps and I'd be happy to see any additional input that people have in the comments. |
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I would second Cytoscape. I have written code for it and have found it to be quite fast and useful. Writing a plugin to retrieve data is easy and so is adding new nodes and edges. |
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Thanks a lot guys, these tools look great and I can't wait to make my hand dirty by trying them out. I am actually doing social media text mining, and at this stage need to find out some sort of ways to visualise the network itself and these tools are definitely helpful. I tried Pajek but it seems very complicated but I will give it another go. I wanted to use NetworkX, but installation failed on Mac and PC. Thanks. Regards, Andy |
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Check out Jure Leskovec's stuff on social networks and large networks at Stanford - his graph visualization software, SNAP, is also very good. |
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There's also GUESS (http://graphexploration.cond.org/). Nice pretty pictures and is written in Java. Many visualization apps can't handle "very large" graphs. By sampling/filtering the graph to reduce its size, one can get things to work. |
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yED is an easy to use, java based graph visualization tool. http://www.yworks.com/en/products_yed_about.html |
See also this question http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/473/large-scale-graph-visualization