Interactive Network Visualization
Network visualization is a topic of interest to me– allowing users to interactively explore large networks.
One of the best tools out there is called Thinkmap; is unfortunately closed source and too expensive for most organizations. A nice demo of it is at the
Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus
Some related open source projects are:
foafCORP is an example of using foaf in an interesting visualisation application. It turns out that there is a lot of cross-pollination amongst the boards of directors of large companies in America. By using foaf, these relationships can be described in a manner that is easy for a computer to understand. All this demo does is provide a User Interface to that data.
LJNet is an interactive visualization of LiveJournal.com members’ social networks. It shows the friends and friends of friends of any given LJ member in an aesthetic and easy to read network - the first image below shows how the friends of our first sample member (b1uebutterf1y) are displayed around her icon (sorted into cliques), their interonnections amongst themselves are shown by curves, and any of their friends not already in the primary ellipse are placed in parabolas further out from them (repeated 2nd degree friends are repeated in multiple parabolas).
Social Circles intends to partially reveal the social networks that emerge in mailing lists. The idea was to visualize in near real-time the social hierarchies and the main subjects they address. When subscribing to a mailing you never know who the principals are, how many people are listening or what subjects they are talking about… At a glance it allows an easy way of grasping the whole situation by highlighting who is participating, who is “visually” central to that group, and displaying the topics everyone is talking about. How does the list structure itself? Is it moderated? Is it chaotic?
