#GexfWalker - What happens after Gephi?
- author: Alexis Jacomy, alexis dot jacomy at gmail dot com
- project: La Carte du Tendre du Web / The Web Tenderness Map
##I. Introduction
This open source web widget is developped as part of the Web Tenderness Map project. This project aims to represent the current tenderness map as a websites network. GexfWalker is diffused under the MIT license.
If many applications are already available to explore and visualize graphs (as Gephi, GUESS, Pajek, etc...), there is not a lot of ways to experience on the Web a local and global navigation of these graphs (the best examples I know are the noticeable Moritz Stefaner's Relation Browser and the really good MindPlayer of ThisIsLike.com for the local view). This tool is particularly developped for the Gephi and GEXF users community. It is all about GEXF, and is supposed to work with any graph spatialised from Gephi and exported as a GEXF file.
###1. Related links
Here are some interesting links relatively to this tool.
##II. Functionalities
Currently, GexfWalker allows the user to:
- Explore the global layout of the graph (the global view)
- Explore the relations related the nodes (the local view)
- In local view:
- Visualize the attributes of the current selected node
- Click on a neighbour of the current selected node to select it
- In case of too many neighbours and labels overlapping, choose the neighbour to select with a combo box (bottom left on the screen)
- In global view:
- Click on a node to select it into the local view
- Select a node in the bottom left combo box to pass to the local view
- Zoom with the mouse wheel
- Drag and drop the graph with the mouse
- And even more:
- Meta data visualisation
- Hypertext links automatically recognized in meta data and attributes
- The SVG background of your choice (see use case at OfNodesAndEdges.com)
##III. How to try it
You need first to have installed on your computer the Adobe Flash Player (if you can watch videos on YouTube, then it is already done). Then:
- Download the last stable version in the Downloads section of this GitHub homepage.
- Open with your web browser the file GexfWalker_sample/index.html
- Enjoy the exploration!
##IV. How to install it on your website
You need first to have a spatialised GEXF-formated graph from the open-source software Gephi (see the tutorials here). Then:
- Download the last stable version in the Downloads section of this GitHub homepage.
- Host somewhere on your website the file GexfWalker_sample/GexfWalker.swf and your GEXF file.
- Replace in GexfWalker_sample/index.html on lines 73 and 77 "./GexfWalker.swf" by the relative path of this file on your server.
- Replace in GexfWalker_sample/index.html on lines 73 and 77 "./sample.gexf" by the relative path of your gexf file on your server.
- Copy/paste on your web page the new HTML code where you want to display your graph.
Finally, your webpage will allow users to explore the graph of your choice.
You can also change some other display settings, for example by replacing the values of width and height in lines 8 and 77 of the HTML code.
For any question (bugs, ideas of new features, etc...), send me an e-mail, but check first if there isn't already an answer on the related wiki or on the related thread on the forum of Gephi