Social Networks Visualiser |
Social Networks Visualizer (SocNetV) is a cross-platform, user-friendly application for the analysis and visualization of Social Networks. It lets you construct social networks (mathematical graphs) with a few clicks on a virtual canvas or load social network data of various formats (GraphML, GraphViz, Adjacency, Pajek, UCINET, etc).
SocNetV enables you to modify the social networks, analyse their social and mathematical properties, produce reports for these properties and apply visualization layouts for relevant presentation of each network. The application supports multirelational loading and editing. You can load a network consisting of multiple relations or create a network on your own and add multiple relations to it.
SocNetV computes graph-theoretic properties, such as density, diameter, geodesics and distances (geodesic lengths), connectedness, eccentricity, etc. It also calculates advanced structural measures for social network analysis such as centrality and prestige indices (i.e. closeness centrality, betweeness centrality, information centrality, power centrality, proximity and rank prestige), triad census, cliques, clustering coefficient, etc.
Furthermore, random networks (Erdos-Renyi, Watts-Strogatz, ring lattice, etc) and well-known social network datasets (i.e. Padgett’s Florentine families) can be easily recreated. SocNetV also offers a built-in web crawler, allowing you to automatically create networks from links found in a given initial URL.
SocNetV also offers various layout algorithms based on either prominence indices (i.e. circular, level and nodal sizes by centrality score) or force-directed models (i.e. Eades, Fruchterman-Reingold, etc) for meaningful visualizations of the social networks.
There is also comprehensive documentation, both online and while running the application, which explains each feature and algorithm of SocNetV in detail.
Source code, packages and executables for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X are available.
The program is Free Software, licensed under the GNU General Public License 3 (GPL3).
You can copy it as many times as you wish, or modify it, provided you keep the same license. The documentation is also Free, licensed under the Free Documentation License (FDL).
The developer, Dimitris Kalamaras holds a BSc in Mathematics, MSc in Informatics and Computational Mathematics. Former Editor-in-Chief of Greek Linux Format and Linux Inside magazines, free software advocate, web developer and social network analysis research.
His other projects include:
- http://www.cmyk3.com – a clever tile game in JavaScript
- http://www.iefimerida.gr – leading news portal in Greece
- http://xrima.iefimerida.gr – stock quotes and markets real time updates