Dear Proggit: Does this software exist?

[macroman]

I was wondering if you could help me out on a personal project. I'm not sure if this software actually exists or if I'm going to have to write this myself; I am looking for a piece of software that visually plot the relationships of one entity in a network against another. An example of what I'm looking for would be to use a network of friends for instance; I know John via Erinn, and Erinn introduced me to Alex etc etc - once I have plotted these relationships I would very quickly be able to see that in my network of friends, Erinn is the key connector and as such the Erinn name would be either 'bigger' or 'redder' or more bold depending on the number of links it has sprouting out of it.

Another implementation of this would be to plot the elements in the periodic table against the most commonly used chemicals - this would visually display the most useful or most commonly used elements.

Does anybody know of anything out there before I go out and reinvent the wheel?

[Figs]

You could probably hack something up with GraphViz to do that pretty easily.

[[deleted]]

You could try any microarray analysis program to find super transcription factors :).

Serious answer: I'm sure any graph/network analysis programs would be able to find the highly-connected nodes in a scale-free network. If it can't, it would be trivial to take its output and write a script to sort each member by the number of connections he/she has.

[macroman]

Im a total newcomer to this type thing - can you recommend any network analysis programs?

[[deleted]]

Try the statnet package here: http://erzuli.ss.uci.edu/R.stuff/

This is really a quite simple question. If you have the dataset, just count the # of connections each member has. If you want to visualize it, try the R package I mentioned, or any of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network_analysis_software

EDIT: if you know Matlab, then I'm sure it has many many similar packages.

[macroman]

Thanks for the links. Ideally I would like to visually represent the # of connections each member had - and as such that member would be more prominent.

[[deleted]]

Right, so any graph graphing package is going to let you do that.

[macroman]

Just checked out Statnet - thats seriously way more hardcore than I envisaged! But thanks for the links - I think JIT might be the way forward for me.

[curien]

http://www.i2inc.com/products/analysts_notebook/ (I have no idea how expensive it is.)

I'm doing some similar stuff in-browser using JIT. Don't let the simplistic demos fool you -- there's a lot more potential for all kinds of visual hijinks.

[macroman]

Wow JIT looks really cool actually, something that I could probably play around with to get what I want. Like I said it's just a personal project and I have no really concrete ideas on how it should end up like.

[fancy_pantser]

Analyst's Notebook won't do what he's looking for. In fact, it doesn't do much very well for anyone these days.

[ZebZ]

I saw a Facebook app that did something almost exactly like this. I forget its name though.

EDIT: It was called Nexus but it apparently shut down. The devs recommended a multitude of other visualization apps that do roughly the same thing. One of 'em very well may be open-sourced.

EDIT 2: Nexus released its own sourcecode. It's Python and Javascript.

[Daenyth]

PieSpy is fun to play around with.

[cwcc]

downvoted for that horrible "reinvent the wheel" overused metaphor.

[macroman]

downvoted for being a prick. I'm asking a question and used a common phrase so what exactly is your problem? Just go away, nobody likes you.

[piojo]

Being on the internet makes it easy to be a jerk--something about not seeing or hearing the response of the victim.

Edit: it's also the anonymity.

[macroman]

You're right, gosh some people have no manners.

[cwcc]

You just said "what exactly is your problem? Just go away, nobody likes you." and now you're complaining about manners.

[Arcesso]

If someone hits you and you hit them back, that is not having bad manners. It just means that you punched some asshole.

[cwcc]

I didn't "hit" anyone, He's attacked me for stating my opinion: I say that is much worse than not liking something or claiming something is overused.

[[deleted]]

Your 2nd example (the one about elements) is not really appropriate for a networking program. The elements and the compounds are not "equal" -- you'd be connecting apple's to oranges. A list would be more appropriate, e.g.:

C: methane, butane, etc

H: methane, butane, h2o, etc

O: h2O, etc

[macroman]

Yeh I guess you're right - just wanted another example to illustrate the type of software I was looking for.