InfoVis Applications, Libraries

NOTE: This post is a work in-progress


Applications and Libraries

Gephi, App, Java (NetBeans build environment)
Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs. Runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Gephi is open-source and free.

prefuse, Library, Java
See also: vizster, uses prefuse to visualise social networks.
Prefuse supports a rich set of features for data modeling, visualization, and interaction. It provides optimized data structures for tables, graphs, and trees, a host of layout and visual encoding techniques, and support for animation, dynamic queries, integrated search, and database connectivity. Prefuse is written in Java, using the Java 2D graphics library, and is easily integrated into Java Swing applications or web applets. Prefuse is licensed under the terms of a BSD license, and can be freely used for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.

prefuse flare, Library, ActionScript
Flare is an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. From basic charts and graphs to complex interactive graphics, the toolkit supports data management, visual encoding, animation, and interaction techniques.

Protovis, Library, Javascript with SVG
Protovis composes custom views of data with simple marks such as bars and dots. Unlike low-level graphics libraries that quickly become tedious for visualization, Protovis defines marks through dynamic properties that encode data, allowing inheritance, scales and layouts to simplify construction.

UbiGraph, Rendering engine, C++,  Linux only
UbiGraph is a tool for visualizing dynamic graphs. The basic version is free, and talks to Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, C, C++, C#, Haskell, and OCaml.

igraph, Library, C++ with Python module and R package
igraph contains functions for generating regular and random graphs, manipulating graphs, assigning attributes to vertices and edges. It can calculate various structural properties, graph isomorphism, includes heuristics for community structure detection, supports many file formats. The R and Python interfaces support visualization.

Graphviz, Tool set
The Graphviz layout programs take descriptions of graphs in a simple text language, and make diagrams in several useful formats such as images and SVG for web pages, Postscript for inclusion in PDF or other documents; or display in an interactive graph browser. (Graphviz also supports GXL, an XML dialect.)


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Jeffrey Heer