How do you auto-create a network diagram?

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How do you auto-create a network diagram?

Tom Johnson
Any FRIAM-ers have insights to this interesting query?

-tom johnson

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan T Keating <[hidden email]>
Date: Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 6:41 AM
Subject: Re: [NICAR-L] How do you auto-create a network diagram?
To: [hidden email]



The data structure described here looks like Semantic Web, an attempt to define relationships that will allow creation of automatic relationships and links that would not otherwise be apparent. We know in math that if a = b and b > c then a > c, but seeing that kind of relationship across data at different websites is not easy.   Once data is in the Resource Descriptor Formt (RDF) format
Object ==> relationship ==> Fact
like
Bill ==> lives on ==> Main St
and
Main St ==> is in ==> Neverland
then tools can start to find patterns in the data.  There's a db query languary for it SPARQL.

I had read some on Semantic Web a couple years ago and seeing the data in this pattern made me wonder if there are more useful tools for digesting it. But zipping around the (old fashioned, non-semantic) web has not revealed much more than theoretical discussions. Maybe someone has put out a good tool for representing data prepared in this format, but I'm not seeing it right now.

The most comprensible links I'm seeing right now are from Joshua Tauberer, the guy behind govtrack.us. His blogs on the topic are at
http://razor.occams.info/blog/category/semantic-web/
_________________________________
Dan Keating
Graphics Editor/Data, The Washington Post
(202) 334-5047, [hidden email]



"Skelton, Chad (Vancouver Sun)" <[hidden email]>

07/09/2010 06:29 PM

Please respond to
Discussion Forum <[hidden email]>

To
[hidden email]
cc
Subject
[NICAR-L] How do you auto-create a network diagram?





Hi everyone,
 
So a colleague of mine has some data showing the inter-locking relationships between various people and companies. The data is set up in a spreadsheet kind of like this
 
Name                    Relationship                       To
John Smith          Works For                           Tim Jones
Tim Jones            Donated Money to         ABC Inc.
ABC Inc.               Employs                               John Smith
ABC Inc.               Hired                                     John Smith
 
She'll looking for a way to map all these relationships to try to get a sense of how these spheres of influence overlap. I know I've seen network diagrams like this before -- different points with lines between them, with text along the lines showing the relationship between the two points. I even remember seeing them in a course I took that dealt with RDFa syntax. I'm assuming there must be tools out there that can create simple diagrams from data kind of like my colleague's.
 
Any tips on what tools we could use to make this work? Those that are free and/or web based would be best. :) Thanks!
 
 
Chad Skelton, Reporter
The Vancouver Sun
[hidden email]
Phone: 604-605-2892
Fax: 604-605-2323
 
Check out my blogs:
vancouversun.com/parenting/
vancouversun.com/papertrail/
 
Follow me at twitter.com/chadskelton and twitter.com/curiousdad
 

==================================================================== To unsubscribe from NICAR-L, please send "unsubscribe NICAR-L" in the body of an e-mail message to "[hidden email]". Please e-mail [hidden email] if you need help or have questions. ====================================================================

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--
==========================================
J. T. Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
www.analyticjournalism.com
505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
http://www.jtjohnson.com                 [hidden email]

"Be Your Own Publisher"
http://indiepubwest.com
==========================================

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
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Re: How do you auto-create a network diagram?

James Steiner
I've only read one book about it, but I think that that is, more or
less, exactly what PROLOG is for.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolog

Intro to prolog:

http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~hzhang/c123/LectureA.pdf

Google Docs Quick View: http://bit.ly/b33CcY

~~James

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 10:29 AM, Tom Johnson <[hidden email]> wrote:

>
> Any FRIAM-ers have insights to this interesting query?
>
> -tom johnson
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Dan T Keating <[hidden email]>
> Date: Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 6:41 AM
> Subject: Re: [NICAR-L] How do you auto-create a network diagram?
> To: [hidden email]
>
>
>
> The data structure described here looks like Semantic Web, an attempt to define relationships that will allow creation of automatic relationships and links that would not otherwise be apparent. We know in math that if a = b and b > c then a > c, but seeing that kind of relationship across data at different websites is not easy.   Once data is in the Resource Descriptor Formt (RDF) format
> Object ==> relationship ==> Fact
> like
> Bill ==> lives on ==> Main St
> and
> Main St ==> is in ==> Neverland
> then tools can start to find patterns in the data.  There's a db query languary for it SPARQL.
>
> I had read some on Semantic Web a couple years ago and seeing the data in this pattern made me wonder if there are more useful tools for digesting it. But zipping around the (old fashioned, non-semantic) web has not revealed much more than theoretical discussions. Maybe someone has put out a good tool for representing data prepared in this format, but I'm not seeing it right now.
>
> The most comprensible links I'm seeing right now are from Joshua Tauberer, the guy behind govtrack.us. His blogs on the topic are at
> http://razor.occams.info/blog/category/semantic-web/
> _________________________________
> Dan Keating
> Graphics Editor/Data, The Washington Post
> (202) 334-5047, [hidden email]
>
>
>
> "Skelton, Chad (Vancouver Sun)" <[hidden email]>
>
> 07/09/2010 06:29 PM
>
> Please respond to
> Discussion Forum <[hidden email]>
> To
> [hidden email]
> cc
> Subject
> [NICAR-L] How do you auto-create a network diagram?
>
>
>
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> So a colleague of mine has some data showing the inter-locking relationships between various people and companies. The data is set up in a spreadsheet kind of like this
>
> Name                    Relationship                       To
> John Smith          Works For                           Tim Jones
> Tim Jones            Donated Money to         ABC Inc.
> ABC Inc.               Employs                               John Smith
> ABC Inc.               Hired                                     John Smith
>
> She'll looking for a way to map all these relationships to try to get a sense of how these spheres of influence overlap. I know I've seen network diagrams like this before -- different points with lines between them, with text along the lines showing the relationship between the two points. I even remember seeing them in a course I took that dealt with RDFa syntax. I'm assuming there must be tools out there that can create simple diagrams from data kind of like my colleague's.
>
> Any tips on what tools we could use to make this work? Those that are free and/or web based would be best. :) Thanks!
>
>
> Chad Skelton, Reporter
> The Vancouver Sun
> [hidden email]
> Phone: 604-605-2892
> Fax: 604-605-2323
>
> Check out my blogs:
> vancouversun.com/parenting/
> vancouversun.com/papertrail/
>

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
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Re: How do you auto-create a network diagram?

Miles Parker

Tom,

There are two aspects to this...

1. Data analysis, filtering, selection. Note that there are hard computational limits that seem to creep up all over the place whenever you get to exploring these kinds of network relationships --many of them NP, i.e. not practically solvable except through approximation. So PROLOG or another logical query language might help you explore relationships, but won't be helpful for a naive query unless you have a lot of time to kill. :) By the time you get out more than two degrees or so, the data collection and visualization become practically challenging to work with depending on the connectivity of the graph.

2. Actually visualizing the parts that you want to see.

It is interesting though that there are a lot of great open source web oriented tools for charting, timelines etc.. (see http://www.simile-widgets.org/exhibit/) but there isn't so much in the way of relatively non-technical "do it yourself" graphing tools out there as far as I know..but I'd love to hear about such a tool if it exists. In increasing order of technical sophistication..

A simple option is to look at Mind Map tools like XMind -- there may be ways to get the data in there but otherwise its going to be a slog. For publication it seems like there would be a tremendous amount of fiddling and simplification to be done anyway so it might very well make sense to do some analysis using above and then more or less manually construct the tree, but there are other ways to do that.

Graph Vis: http://www.graphviz.org/

People have done a lot with  http://processing.org/

Which is relatively easy to get into for those with less software experience.

Zest is a great tool for this in Eclipse and the Agent Modeling Platform uses that extensively to support visualization of graphs for example, but right now this only works out of the box for constructed graphs, not for imported ones.

Feel free to refer your colleagues to me if I can help fill in any of the dots here a bit..

cheers,

Miles


>
> On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 10:29 AM, Tom Johnson <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>
>> Any FRIAM-ers have insights to this interesting query?
>>
>> -tom johnson
>>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>> From: Dan T Keating <[hidden email]>
>> Date: Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 6:41 AM
>> Subject: Re: [NICAR-L] How do you auto-create a network diagram?
>> To: [hidden email]
>>
>>
>>
>> The data structure described here looks like Semantic Web, an attempt to define relationships that will allow creation of automatic relationships and links that would not otherwise be apparent. We know in math that if a = b and b > c then a > c, but seeing that kind of relationship across data at different websites is not easy.   Once data is in the Resource Descriptor Formt (RDF) format
>> Object ==> relationship ==> Fact
>> like
>> Bill ==> lives on ==> Main St
>> and
>> Main St ==> is in ==> Neverland
>> then tools can start to find patterns in the data.  There's a db query languary for it SPARQL.
>>
>> I had read some on Semantic Web a couple years ago and seeing the data in this pattern made me wonder if there are more useful tools for digesting it. But zipping around the (old fashioned, non-semantic) web has not revealed much more than theoretical discussions. Maybe someone has put out a good tool for representing data prepared in this format, but I'm not seeing it right now.
>>
>> The most comprensible links I'm seeing right now are from Joshua Tauberer, the guy behind govtrack.us. His blogs on the topic are at
>> http://razor.occams.info/blog/category/semantic-web/
>> _________________________________
>> Dan Keating
>> Graphics Editor/Data, The Washington Post
>> (202) 334-5047, [hidden email]
>>
>>
>>
>> "Skelton, Chad (Vancouver Sun)" <[hidden email]>
>>
>> 07/09/2010 06:29 PM
>>
>> Please respond to
>> Discussion Forum <[hidden email]>
>> To
>> [hidden email]
>> cc
>> Subject
>> [NICAR-L] How do you auto-create a network diagram?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> So a colleague of mine has some data showing the inter-locking relationships between various people and companies. The data is set up in a spreadsheet kind of like this
>>
>> Name                    Relationship                       To
>> John Smith          Works For                           Tim Jones
>> Tim Jones            Donated Money to         ABC Inc.
>> ABC Inc.               Employs                               John Smith
>> ABC Inc.               Hired                                     John Smith
>>
>> She'll looking for a way to map all these relationships to try to get a sense of how these spheres of influence overlap. I know I've seen network diagrams like this before -- different points with lines between them, with text along the lines showing the relationship between the two points. I even remember seeing them in a course I took that dealt with RDFa syntax. I'm assuming there must be tools out there that can create simple diagrams from data kind of like my colleague's.
>>
>> Any tips on what tools we could use to make this work? Those that are free and/or web based would be best. :) Thanks!
>>
>>
>> Chad Skelton, Reporter
>> The Vancouver Sun
>> [hidden email]
>> Phone: 604-605-2892
>> Fax: 604-605-2323
>>
>> Check out my blogs:
>> vancouversun.com/parenting/
>> vancouversun.com/papertrail/
>>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
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Re: How do you auto-create a network diagram?

Marcus G. Daniels
On 7/12/10 11:39 AM, Miles Parker wrote:
> There are two aspects to this...
>
>    
At least three -- data acquisition will probably take as much time as
the smartypants stuff unless someone is giving you clean data to begin
with.   Getting well-formed tree structures or proposition lists (e.g.
XML or RDF, etc) with a minimal dictionary of nouns and verbs tends to
be a lot of manual labor...  Find a librarian to help!

Marcus

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
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Re: How do you auto-create a network diagram?

Stephen Guerin-3
In reply to this post by Tom Johnson
For opensource graph visualization, you might check out:
   http://gephi.org/

FWIW, Josh and I have been building up a tool we're internally calling  
"EventFlow" that builds up temporal graphs from standard data. Here's  
a couple videos that show the tool as we're describing it to our  
collaborators in the UK:
   http://redfish.com/SFComplex/projects/UKNHSShropshire.html

The user can input multiple spreadsheets or tables of two types:  
entities and events. Entities you can think of as nouns in a system  
and might be what actually flows through the system. In the case of a  
healthcare the entities might be patients, doctors, or medications.  
The events bind the nouns together with a start and end timestamp. In  
healthcare, we are using insurance billing data that has a particular  
patient mapped to a doctor, clinic, service and medication. We're also  
using performance data for the events.

In education, the entities would be students, teachers, classrooms and  
events would be the transcripts binding a student to a teacher,  
classroom, subject and performance grade.

EventFlow is not yet in a shrink-wrapped form but maybe after a couple  
more projects with it....

-S

_____________________________________________________________
[hidden email]
(m) 505-216-6226 (o) 505-995-0206
sfcomplex.org | simtable.com | ambientpixel.com | redfish.com

On Jul 12, 2010, at 7:29 AM, Tom Johnson wrote:

> Any FRIAM-ers have insights to this interesting query?
>
> -tom johnson
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Dan T Keating <[hidden email]>
> Date: Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 6:41 AM
> Subject: Re: [NICAR-L] How do you auto-create a network diagram?
> To: [hidden email]
>
>
>
> The data structure described here looks like Semantic Web, an  
> attempt to define relationships that will allow creation of  
> automatic relationships and links that would not otherwise be  
> apparent. We know in math that if a = b and b > c then a > c, but  
> seeing that kind of relationship across data at different websites  
> is not easy.   Once data is in the Resource Descriptor Formt (RDF)  
> format
> Object ==> relationship ==> Fact
> like
> Bill ==> lives on ==> Main St
> and
> Main St ==> is in ==> Neverland
> then tools can start to find patterns in the data.  There's a db  
> query languary for it SPARQL.
>
> I had read some on Semantic Web a couple years ago and seeing the  
> data in this pattern made me wonder if there are more useful tools  
> for digesting it. But zipping around the (old fashioned, non-
> semantic) web has not revealed much more than theoretical  
> discussions. Maybe someone has put out a good tool for representing  
> data prepared in this format, but I'm not seeing it right now.
>
> The most comprensible links I'm seeing right now are from Joshua  
> Tauberer, the guy behind govtrack.us. His blogs on the topic are at
> http://razor.occams.info/blog/category/semantic-web/
> _________________________________
> Dan Keating
> Graphics Editor/Data, The Washington Post
> (202) 334-5047, [hidden email]
>
>
>
> "Skelton, Chad (Vancouver Sun)" <[hidden email]>
> 07/09/2010 06:29 PM
>
> Please respond to
> Discussion Forum <[hidden email]>
>
> To
> [hidden email]
> cc
> Subject
> [NICAR-L] How do you auto-create a network diagram?
>
>
>
>
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> So a colleague of mine has some data showing the inter-locking  
> relationships between various people and companies. The data is set  
> up in a spreadsheet kind of like this
>
> Name                    Relationship                       To
> John Smith          Works For                           Tim Jones
> Tim Jones            Donated Money to         ABC Inc.
> ABC Inc.               Employs                               John  
> Smith
> ABC Inc.               Hired                                      
> John Smith
>
> She'll looking for a way to map all these relationships to try to  
> get a sense of how these spheres of influence overlap. I know I've  
> seen network diagrams like this before -- different points with  
> lines between them, with text along the lines showing the  
> relationship between the two points. I even remember seeing them in  
> a course I took that dealt with RDFa syntax. I'm assuming there must  
> be tools out there that can create simple diagrams from data kind of  
> like my colleague's.
>
> Any tips on what tools we could use to make this work? Those that  
> are free and/or web based would be best. :) Thanks!
>
>
> Chad Skelton, Reporter
> The Vancouver Sun
> [hidden email]
> Phone: 604-605-2892
> Fax: 604-605-2323
>
> Check out my blogs:
> vancouversun.com/parenting/
> vancouversun.com/papertrail/
>
> Follow me at twitter.com/chadskelton and twitter.com/curiousdad
>
> ====================================================================  
> To unsubscribe from NICAR-L, please send "unsubscribe NICAR-L" in  
> the body of an e-mail message to "[hidden email]".  
> Please e-mail [hidden email] if you need help or have questions.  
> ====================================================================
>
> ====================================================================  
> To unsubscribe from NICAR-L, please send "unsubscribe NICAR-L" in  
> the body of an e-mail message to "[hidden email]".  
> Please e-mail [hidden email] if you need help or have questions.  
> ====================================================================
>
>
>
>
> --
> ==========================================
> J. T. Johnson
> Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
> www.analyticjournalism.com
> 505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
> http://www.jtjohnson.com                 [hidden email]
>
> "Be Your Own Publisher"
> http://indiepubwest.com
> ==========================================
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
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Re: How do you auto-create a network diagram?

Brent Auble
The simplest and most accessible tool for non-programmers to create a network diagram is probably NodeXL (http://nodexl.codeplex.com/), which is a free plug-in to Excel 2007.  I've just started playing around with this and it is pretty neat.  What's really nice about it is that it works off of a tool that many people are already familiar with (Excel) and can take advantage of all of Excel's capabilities.  Plus you can see the data in the spreadsheet right next to the graph -- click on a node in the graph and the spreadsheet highlights the row with the data on that node, and vice versa, click on the node data in the spreadsheet and the node and its links are highlighted in the graph.  This tool should allow the original requestor to color links different ways based on the type of relationship, and then filter to see subsets of those relationships (e.g., just "works for: or "donated money to").
 
The University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab has links to a bunch of freely available graph visualization tools they've developed (including NodeXL): http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/graphvis/
 
A couple of free web-based options are Many Eyes (http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/), which definitely does network diagrams (although I'm not sure how pretty they are), and Tableau Public (http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/), which may not do graphs, but can certainly do some really neat things with data analysis.  However, I believe both of these options force you to make your raw data public as well (or at least what's needed to create the visualization), which may or may not be what they're looking for.  The non-free version of Tableau doesn't have that requirement.  I don't believe there's a commercial version of Many Eyes yet (although I'm sure IBM would be happy to sell you something if you asked).

Brent


From: Stephen Guerin <[hidden email]>
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Sent: Mon, July 12, 2010 4:18:13 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] How do you auto-create a network diagram?

For opensource graph visualization, you might check out:
  http://gephi.org/

FWIW, Josh and I have been building up a tool we're internally calling "EventFlow" that builds up temporal graphs from standard data. Here's a couple videos that show the tool as we're describing it to our collaborators in the UK:
  http://redfish.com/SFComplex/projects/UKNHSShropshire.html

The user can input multiple spreadsheets or tables of two types: entities and events. Entities you can think of as nouns in a system and might be what actually flows through the system. In the case of a healthcare the entities might be patients, doctors, or medications. The events bind the nouns together with a start and end timestamp. In healthcare, we are using insurance billing data that has a particular patient mapped to a doctor, clinic, service and medication. We're also using performance data for the events.

In education, the entities would be students, teachers, classrooms and events would be the transcripts binding a student to a teacher, classroom, subject and performance grade.

EventFlow is not yet in a shrink-wrapped form but maybe after a couple more projects with it....

-S

_____________________________________________________________
[hidden email]
(m) 505-216-6226 (o) 505-995-0206
sfcomplex.org | simtable.com | ambientpixel.com | redfish.com

On Jul 12, 2010, at 7:29 AM, Tom Johnson wrote:

> Any FRIAM-ers have insights to this interesting query?
>
> -tom johnson
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Dan T Keating <[hidden email]>
> Date: Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 6:41 AM
> Subject: Re: [NICAR-L] How do you auto-create a network diagram?
> To: [hidden email]
>
>
>
> The data structure described here looks like Semantic Web, an attempt to define relationships that will allow creation of automatic relationships and links that would not otherwise be apparent. We know in math that if a = b and b > c then a > c, but seeing that kind of relationship across data at different websites is not easy.  Once data is in the Resource Descriptor Formt (RDF) format
> Object ==> relationship ==> Fact
> like
> Bill ==> lives on ==> Main St
> and
> Main St ==> is in ==> Neverland
> then tools can start to find patterns in the data.  There's a db query languary for it SPARQL.
>
> I had read some on Semantic Web a couple years ago and seeing the data in this pattern made me wonder if there are more useful tools for digesting it. But zipping around the (old fashioned, non-semantic) web has not revealed much more than theoretical discussions. Maybe someone has put out a good tool for representing data prepared in this format, but I'm not seeing it right now.
>
> The most comprensible links I'm seeing right now are from Joshua Tauberer, the guy behind govtrack.us. His blogs on the topic are at
> http://razor.occams.info/blog/category/semantic-web/
> _________________________________
> Dan Keating
> Graphics Editor/Data, The Washington Post
> (202) 334-5047, [hidden email]
>
>
>
> "Skelton, Chad (Vancouver Sun)" <[hidden email]>
> 07/09/2010 06:29 PM
>
> Please respond to
> Discussion Forum <[hidden email]>
>
> To
> [hidden email]
> cc
> Subject
> [NICAR-L] How do you auto-create a network diagram?
>
>
>
>
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> So a colleague of mine has some data showing the inter-locking relationships between various people and companies. The data is set up in a spreadsheet kind of like this
>
> Name                    Relationship                      To
> John Smith          Works For                          Tim Jones
> Tim Jones            Donated Money to        ABC Inc.
> ABC Inc.              Employs                              John Smith
> ABC Inc.              Hired                                    John Smith
>
> She'll looking for a way to map all these relationships to try to get a sense of how these spheres of influence overlap. I know I've seen network diagrams like this before -- different points with lines between them, with text along the lines showing the relationship between the two points. I even remember seeing them in a course I took that dealt with RDFa syntax. I'm assuming there must be tools out there that can create simple diagrams from data kind of like my colleague's.
>
> Any tips on what tools we could use to make this work? Those that are free and/or web based would be best. :) Thanks!
>
>
> Chad Skelton, Reporter
> The Vancouver Sun
> [hidden email]
> Phone: 604-605-2892
> Fax: 604-605-2323
>
> Check out my blogs:
> vancouversun.com/parenting/
> vancouversun.com/papertrail/
>
> Follow me at twitter.com/chadskelton and twitter.com/curiousdad
>
> ==================================================================== To unsubscribe from NICAR-L, please send "unsubscribe NICAR-L" in the body of an e-mail message to "[hidden email]". Please e-mail [hidden email] if you need help or have questions. ====================================================================
>
> ==================================================================== To unsubscribe from NICAR-L, please send "unsubscribe NICAR-L" in the body of an e-mail message to "[hidden email]". Please e-mail [hidden email] if you need help or have questions. ====================================================================
>
>
>
>
> --==========================================
> J. T. Johnson
> Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
> www.analyticjournalism.com
> 505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
> http://www.jtjohnson.com                [hidden email]
>
> "Be Your Own Publisher"
> http://indiepubwest.com
> ==========================================
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org


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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Re: How do you auto-create a network diagram?

Miles Parker
<base href="x-msg://18/">

On Jul 12, 2010, at 2:18 PM, Brent Auble wrote:
A couple of free web-based options are Many Eyes (http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/), which definitely does network diagrams (although I'm not sure how pretty they are), and Tableau Public (http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/), which may not do graphs, but can certainly do some really neat things with data analysis.  However, I believe both of these options force you to make your raw data public as well (or at least what's needed to create the visualization), which may or may not be what they're looking for.  The non-free version of Tableau doesn't have that requirement.  I don't believe there's a commercial version of Many Eyes yet (although I'm sure IBM would be happy to sell you something if you asked).

$1k for Tableau. :O In the next year or so you should see sets of Open Source tech that together do far more but it is a neat demo of the possible.

On the subject of data analysis, I should mention KNIME -- see: http://www.knime.org/introduction/screenshots. It's really easy to setup data analytics like workflows. But first, yeah, hire a librarian.

On Jul 12, 2010, at 1:18 PM, Stephen Guerin wrote:

For opensource graph visualization, you might check out:
 http://gephi.org/

Wow, that has it all over Zest, the current Eclipse hosted offering. Makes me wonder how hard it would be to turn into a set of Eclipse plugins..


FWIW, Josh and I have been building up a tool we're internally calling "EventFlow" that builds up temporal graphs from standard data. Here's a couple videos that show the tool as we're describing it to our collaborators in the UK:
 http://redfish.com/SFComplex/projects/UKNHSShropshire.html


Neat, guys!


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Re: How do you auto-create a network diagram?

Marcus G. Daniels
Miles Parker wrote:
> On the subject of data analysis, I should mention KNIME --
> see: http://www.knime.org/introduction/screenshots. It's really easy
> to setup data analytics like workflows.
This looks a lot like the popular commercial package Pipeline Pilot from
Accelrys.
> On Jul 12, 2010, at 1:18 PM, Stephen Guerin wrote:
>
>> For opensource graph visualization, you might check out:
>>  http://gephi.org/
Also,  http://www.cytoscape.org/



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Re: How do you auto-create a network diagram?

Nick Thompson
In reply to this post by Tom Johnson
steve,

I don't know if this is relevant, but there was still, when I last looked,
no web tool for building family timelines.  Lot's of genealogy but no time
line software.  So, one would enter family events into a form and the
software would plot those events in relation to those of other family
members and larger social events.  It could a data base of time lines of
famous people  so, for instance, you could find out what Ali Mcgraw was
doing on the day you fell in love for the first time.  Is this a
webappllication version of what you are doing that could be sold  for 25
dollars to 50 million people and make you shit rich?

Probably not.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe]




> [Original Message]
> From: Stephen Guerin <[hidden email]>
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
> Date: 7/12/2010 4:18:50 PM
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] How do you auto-create a network diagram?
>
> For opensource graph visualization, you might check out:
>    http://gephi.org/
>
> FWIW, Josh and I have been building up a tool we're internally calling  
> "EventFlow" that builds up temporal graphs from standard data. Here's  
> a couple videos that show the tool as we're describing it to our  
> collaborators in the UK:
>    http://redfish.com/SFComplex/projects/UKNHSShropshire.html
>
> The user can input multiple spreadsheets or tables of two types:  
> entities and events. Entities you can think of as nouns in a system  
> and might be what actually flows through the system. In the case of a  
> healthcare the entities might be patients, doctors, or medications.  
> The events bind the nouns together with a start and end timestamp. In  
> healthcare, we are using insurance billing data that has a particular  
> patient mapped to a doctor, clinic, service and medication. We're also  
> using performance data for the events.
>
> In education, the entities would be students, teachers, classrooms and  
> events would be the transcripts binding a student to a teacher,  
> classroom, subject and performance grade.
>
> EventFlow is not yet in a shrink-wrapped form but maybe after a couple  
> more projects with it....
>
> -S
>
> _____________________________________________________________
> [hidden email]
> (m) 505-216-6226 (o) 505-995-0206
> sfcomplex.org | simtable.com | ambientpixel.com | redfish.com
>
> On Jul 12, 2010, at 7:29 AM, Tom Johnson wrote:
>
> > Any FRIAM-ers have insights to this interesting query?
> >
> > -tom johnson
> >
> > ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> > From: Dan T Keating <[hidden email]>
> > Date: Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 6:41 AM
> > Subject: Re: [NICAR-L] How do you auto-create a network diagram?
> > To: [hidden email]
> >
> >
> >
> > The data structure described here looks like Semantic Web, an  
> > attempt to define relationships that will allow creation of  
> > automatic relationships and links that would not otherwise be  
> > apparent. We know in math that if a = b and b > c then a > c, but  
> > seeing that kind of relationship across data at different websites  
> > is not easy.   Once data is in the Resource Descriptor Formt (RDF)  
> > format
> > Object ==> relationship ==> Fact
> > like
> > Bill ==> lives on ==> Main St
> > and
> > Main St ==> is in ==> Neverland
> > then tools can start to find patterns in the data.  There's a db  
> > query languary for it SPARQL.
> >
> > I had read some on Semantic Web a couple years ago and seeing the  
> > data in this pattern made me wonder if there are more useful tools  
> > for digesting it. But zipping around the (old fashioned, non-
> > semantic) web has not revealed much more than theoretical  
> > discussions. Maybe someone has put out a good tool for representing  
> > data prepared in this format, but I'm not seeing it right now.
> >
> > The most comprensible links I'm seeing right now are from Joshua  
> > Tauberer, the guy behind govtrack.us. His blogs on the topic are at
> > http://razor.occams.info/blog/category/semantic-web/
> > _________________________________
> > Dan Keating
> > Graphics Editor/Data, The Washington Post
> > (202) 334-5047, [hidden email]
> >
> >
> >
> > "Skelton, Chad (Vancouver Sun)" <[hidden email]>
> > 07/09/2010 06:29 PM
> >
> > Please respond to
> > Discussion Forum <[hidden email]>
> >
> > To
> > [hidden email]
> > cc
> > Subject
> > [NICAR-L] How do you auto-create a network diagram?
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > So a colleague of mine has some data showing the inter-locking  
> > relationships between various people and companies. The data is set  
> > up in a spreadsheet kind of like this
> >
> > Name                    Relationship                       To
> > John Smith          Works For                           Tim Jones
> > Tim Jones            Donated Money to         ABC Inc.
> > ABC Inc.               Employs                               John  
> > Smith
> > ABC Inc.               Hired                                      
> > John Smith
> >
> > She'll looking for a way to map all these relationships to try to  
> > get a sense of how these spheres of influence overlap. I know I've  
> > seen network diagrams like this before -- different points with  
> > lines between them, with text along the lines showing the  
> > relationship between the two points. I even remember seeing them in  
> > a course I took that dealt with RDFa syntax. I'm assuming there must  
> > be tools out there that can create simple diagrams from data kind of  
> > like my colleague's.
> >
> > Any tips on what tools we could use to make this work? Those that  
> > are free and/or web based would be best. :) Thanks!
> >
> >
> > Chad Skelton, Reporter
> > The Vancouver Sun
> > [hidden email]
> > Phone: 604-605-2892
> > Fax: 604-605-2323
> >
> > Check out my blogs:
> > vancouversun.com/parenting/
> > vancouversun.com/papertrail/
> >
> > Follow me at twitter.com/chadskelton and twitter.com/curiousdad
> >
> > ====================================================================  
> > To unsubscribe from NICAR-L, please send "unsubscribe NICAR-L" in  
> > the body of an e-mail message to "[hidden email]".  
> > Please e-mail [hidden email] if you need help or have questions.  
> > ====================================================================
> >
> > ====================================================================  
> > To unsubscribe from NICAR-L, please send "unsubscribe NICAR-L" in  
> > the body of an e-mail message to "[hidden email]".  
> > Please e-mail [hidden email] if you need help or have questions.  
> > ====================================================================
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > ==========================================
> > J. T. Johnson
> > Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
> > www.analyticjournalism.com
> > 505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
> > http://www.jtjohnson.com                 [hidden email]
> >
> > "Be Your Own Publisher"
> > http://indiepubwest.com
> > ==========================================
> > ============================================================
> > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org



============================================================
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Re: How do you auto-create a network diagram?

Miles Parker

Nick,

Something like this...

http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/examples/monet/monet.html

?

Sorry, no Ali McGraw..

Miles


On Jul 13, 2010, at 7:46 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

> steve,
>
> I don't know if this is relevant, but there was still, when I last looked,
> no web tool for building family timelines.  Lot's of genealogy but no time
> line software.  So, one would enter family events into a form and the
> software would plot those events in relation to those of other family
> members and larger social events.  It could a data base of time lines of
> famous people  so, for instance, you could find out what Ali Mcgraw was
> doing on the day you fell in love for the first time.  Is this a
> webappllication version of what you are doing that could be sold  for 25
> dollars to 50 million people and make you shit rich?
>
> Probably not.
>
> Nick
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
> Clark University ([hidden email])
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
> http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe]
>
>
>
>
>> [Original Message]
>> From: Stephen Guerin <[hidden email]>
>> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
>> Date: 7/12/2010 4:18:50 PM
>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] How do you auto-create a network diagram?
>>
>> For opensource graph visualization, you might check out:
>>   http://gephi.org/
>>
>> FWIW, Josh and I have been building up a tool we're internally calling  
>> "EventFlow" that builds up temporal graphs from standard data. Here's  
>> a couple videos that show the tool as we're describing it to our  
>> collaborators in the UK:
>>   http://redfish.com/SFComplex/projects/UKNHSShropshire.html
>>
>> The user can input multiple spreadsheets or tables of two types:  
>> entities and events. Entities you can think of as nouns in a system  
>> and might be what actually flows through the system. In the case of a  
>> healthcare the entities might be patients, doctors, or medications.  
>> The events bind the nouns together with a start and end timestamp. In  
>> healthcare, we are using insurance billing data that has a particular  
>> patient mapped to a doctor, clinic, service and medication. We're also  
>> using performance data for the events.
>>
>> In education, the entities would be students, teachers, classrooms and  
>> events would be the transcripts binding a student to a teacher,  
>> classroom, subject and performance grade.
>>
>> EventFlow is not yet in a shrink-wrapped form but maybe after a couple  
>> more projects with it....
>>
>> -S
>>
>> _____________________________________________________________
>> [hidden email]
>> (m) 505-216-6226 (o) 505-995-0206
>> sfcomplex.org | simtable.com | ambientpixel.com | redfish.com
>>
>> On Jul 12, 2010, at 7:29 AM, Tom Johnson wrote:
>>
>>> Any FRIAM-ers have insights to this interesting query?
>>>
>>> -tom johnson
>>>
>>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>>> From: Dan T Keating <[hidden email]>
>>> Date: Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 6:41 AM
>>> Subject: Re: [NICAR-L] How do you auto-create a network diagram?
>>> To: [hidden email]
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> The data structure described here looks like Semantic Web, an  
>>> attempt to define relationships that will allow creation of  
>>> automatic relationships and links that would not otherwise be  
>>> apparent. We know in math that if a = b and b > c then a > c, but  
>>> seeing that kind of relationship across data at different websites  
>>> is not easy.   Once data is in the Resource Descriptor Formt (RDF)  
>>> format
>>> Object ==> relationship ==> Fact
>>> like
>>> Bill ==> lives on ==> Main St
>>> and
>>> Main St ==> is in ==> Neverland
>>> then tools can start to find patterns in the data.  There's a db  
>>> query languary for it SPARQL.
>>>
>>> I had read some on Semantic Web a couple years ago and seeing the  
>>> data in this pattern made me wonder if there are more useful tools  
>>> for digesting it. But zipping around the (old fashioned, non-
>>> semantic) web has not revealed much more than theoretical  
>>> discussions. Maybe someone has put out a good tool for representing  
>>> data prepared in this format, but I'm not seeing it right now.
>>>
>>> The most comprensible links I'm seeing right now are from Joshua  
>>> Tauberer, the guy behind govtrack.us. His blogs on the topic are at
>>> http://razor.occams.info/blog/category/semantic-web/
>>> _________________________________
>>> Dan Keating
>>> Graphics Editor/Data, The Washington Post
>>> (202) 334-5047, [hidden email]
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> "Skelton, Chad (Vancouver Sun)" <[hidden email]>
>>> 07/09/2010 06:29 PM
>>>
>>> Please respond to
>>> Discussion Forum <[hidden email]>
>>>
>>> To
>>> [hidden email]
>>> cc
>>> Subject
>>> [NICAR-L] How do you auto-create a network diagram?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Hi everyone,
>>>
>>> So a colleague of mine has some data showing the inter-locking  
>>> relationships between various people and companies. The data is set  
>>> up in a spreadsheet kind of like this
>>>
>>> Name                    Relationship                       To
>>> John Smith          Works For                           Tim Jones
>>> Tim Jones            Donated Money to         ABC Inc.
>>> ABC Inc.               Employs                               John  
>>> Smith
>>> ABC Inc.               Hired                                      
>>> John Smith
>>>
>>> She'll looking for a way to map all these relationships to try to  
>>> get a sense of how these spheres of influence overlap. I know I've  
>>> seen network diagrams like this before -- different points with  
>>> lines between them, with text along the lines showing the  
>>> relationship between the two points. I even remember seeing them in  
>>> a course I took that dealt with RDFa syntax. I'm assuming there must  
>>> be tools out there that can create simple diagrams from data kind of  
>>> like my colleague's.
>>>
>>> Any tips on what tools we could use to make this work? Those that  
>>> are free and/or web based would be best. :) Thanks!
>>>
>>>
>>> Chad Skelton, Reporter
>>> The Vancouver Sun
>>> [hidden email]
>>> Phone: 604-605-2892
>>> Fax: 604-605-2323
>>>
>>> Check out my blogs:
>>> vancouversun.com/parenting/
>>> vancouversun.com/papertrail/
>>>
>>> Follow me at twitter.com/chadskelton and twitter.com/curiousdad
>>>
>>> ====================================================================  
>>> To unsubscribe from NICAR-L, please send "unsubscribe NICAR-L" in  
>>> the body of an e-mail message to "[hidden email]".  
>>> Please e-mail [hidden email] if you need help or have questions.  
>>> ====================================================================
>>>
>>> ====================================================================  
>>> To unsubscribe from NICAR-L, please send "unsubscribe NICAR-L" in  
>>> the body of an e-mail message to "[hidden email]".  
>>> Please e-mail [hidden email] if you need help or have questions.  
>>> ====================================================================
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> ==========================================
>>> J. T. Johnson
>>> Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
>>> www.analyticjournalism.com
>>> 505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
>>> http://www.jtjohnson.com                 [hidden email]
>>>
>>> "Be Your Own Publisher"
>>> http://indiepubwest.com
>>> ==========================================
>>> ============================================================
>>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>>> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>>
>>
>> ============================================================
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org