Re: Feedback

[Yoann Pigné <yoann.pigne AT gmail.com>]

Dear Michael,

As Guilhelm said, It's really nice that you give us feedback. Thank you again.

I  will give some peaces of answer about some of the problems you highlight. 

1) About a real-time file reader. This will definitely end up in the short 
term roadmap. It really seams important for real-time data analysis and 
moreover, it doesn't seam that complicated to implement :) 

3) About the "OneTimeEdge". It sound interesting again for real-time data 
analysis, and it is possible to achieve this goal but it requires a some 
computing. We can think of a more straightforward way to do it and will 
discuss it with the development team, but I doubt it would ever end up in the 
general "stream" framework since it is too much specialized for real-time 
data analysis.

5) The "sloppy" option already exists, exactly as you wish. You just need 2 
boolean parameters in the graph constructor. The first (strictChecking) set 
to "false" disables some consistency checks that generate the exception you 
usually get. The second (AutoCreate), set to true actually has the "sloppy" 
behavior and creates nodes when missing:  
        Graph g = new SingleGraph("My graph", false, true);
        g.addEdge("AB", "A", "B");
        g.addEdge("BC", "B", "C");
        g.addEdge("CA", "C", "A"); 


Best Regards,
Yoann
 
   
On Sep 19, 2010, at 11:11 AM, guilhelm savin wrote:

> It seems a bit distribution problem happens, so I transfer this mail:
> 
> ---------- Message transféré ----------
> From: Michael Szell 
> <michael.szell AT meduniwien.ac.at>
> To: 
> users AT graphstream-project.org
> Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2010 13:36:11 +0100
> Subject: feedback
> 
> Hello,
> 
> this is a list of feedback on issues/feature suggestions for making
> life easier for the gs user which I have encountered after my first
> day of use. From what I have seen at the ECCS'10, gs has the potential
> for becoming a standard tool for the visualization of evolving
> networks, and the developers have done excellent work so far. Note: My
> background is in maths/physics, my work is on social network analysis
> (so I don't know anything about biological or other networks), and I
> have no experience with Java.
> 
> 1) Real time: Many datasets (e.g. mobile phone calls) come with
> timestamps, and since human behavior is kind of "bursty" (very
> heterogeneous in time), a feature is needed to incorporate this
> real-time information, at least for the visualization (the "steps" of
> gs are too poor for this). Here an example of such data:
> SourceNodeID DestinationNodeID Timestamp(UNIX-time)
> 9993659 82423521 1182187454
> 9993659 82423521 1182193682
> 9993659 82423521 1182193693
> 51494778 14040501 1182195482
> 51494778 14040501 1182195500
> 51494778 14040501 1182195506
> 51494778 76170314 1182195560
> ....
> A simple solution could be to give st an optional attribute "time",
> then one could translate+include timestamps into the dgs format.
> 
> 2) More tutorials: For example, a step by step setup of eclipse+gs
> with a "hello world" example (as in the real-life ECCS tutorial), how
> to visualize multi-edges, or how to export an animation into a movie
> file.
> 
> 3) Relation types: In social networks, there are persistent relations
> (e.g. friendship), which remain over some time and can eventually be
> deleted, and there are one-time events such as writing an email. In
> network studies these one-time events are usually accumulated over a
> time window of some days, since e.g. an email you wrote to someone a
> year ago is not relevant anymore. It would be great if there was some
> function which adds a link, immediately deletes it, but in the
> visualization it is shown as some kind of disappearing arrow (see
> http://www.youtube.com/user/complexsystemsvienna#p/a/u/0/NC-Gtu2yaCU
> for an example). It could be realized by a new datatype, such as
> "OneTimeEdge".
> 
> 4) A "sloppy" option (boolean parameter in addEdge() and
> nextEvents()?) for handling of edge additions: Whenever one tries to
> add an edge between non-existing nodes, an exception is thrown
> ("cannot make edge from 'A' to 'B' since node 'A' is not part of this
> graph"). As a user I know that these nodes have been newly added with
> the edge, and I don't want to bother adding them by hand. Removal of
> nodes is already "sloppy": When I remove a node, edges connecting to
> it are removed too - I don't need to remove the edges first (or do
> I?).
> 
> 5) Pajek format: Most people in my field use Pajek for visualizing
> static networks. Support of the Pajek network format would maybe reach
> more people (personally I think the format is ugly, but many people
> use it).
> 
> 
> I would love to use gs to create some videos with my data, but at the
> current development stage it seems I would have to spend too much time
> trying to find out how things work in gs and java, and writing
> hacks/workarounds. But maybe in the near future! :)
> 
> Cheers,
> Michael
> 
> --
> Section for Science of Complex Systems
> Medical University of Vienna
> http://www.complex-systems.meduniwien.ac.at/people/mszell
>