Data-Driven Documents for Interactive Graph Visualization

Richard Schäfer

Visualization of Networks

● desktop-based graph visualization software (Cytoscape, Graphviz, Ubigraph, Gephi, Tulip)

● software development undergoes a general shift towards rich internet applications (RIAs)

● rich internet paradigm is beneficial for graph visualization, e.g., Touchgraph, Many Eyes

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs)

● web-based applications that have the characteristics of graphical desktop applications

● direct interaction and internet accessability● thin/thick clients and plugin/native applications● html5/javascript-based technologies are

dominant in native applications (asynchronous call model)

Languages of GitHub in 2014

language repositories stars forks pushes

JavaScript 791535 1038226 261837 8819035

Java 561366 343976 172274 5480115

Ruby 479525 156843 69345 3086294

CSS 354354 290100 117524 4857901

PHP 346761 168715 72059 3332387

Python 317085 311594 107076 4038751

C 289880 164699 63878 1748309

C++ 164722 119383 55801 2123745

C# 123509 73378 37620 1349850

Objective-C 119345 350822 56678 769319

Data-Driven-Documents (d3.js)

● javascript library for interactive data visualizations on the web

● manipulation of DOM elements● making use of web-standards

for the data visualization, e.g., HTML, SVG and CSS

● full advantage of real-time data

"Document Object Model." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 15 Jan. 2015.

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)

● syntax for organizing data as JavaScript objects

● language-independent ● node-link data format as

input for data visualization● parsable by networkx for

internal processing

Behavior-Driven Development

BugHuntress, Software testing & QA (2013)