Gephi has an amazing community of passionate users and developers. In the past few years, they have been very dedicated creating tutorials, developing new plugins or helping out on GitHub. They also have been patiently waiting for a new Gephi release! Today we’re happy to share with you that the wait will come to an end December 20th with the release of Gephi 0.9 for Windows, MacOS X and Linux.
We’re very excited about this upcoming release and developers are hard at work to deliver its roadmap before the end of 2015. This release will resolve a serie of compatibility issues as well as improve features and performance.
Our vision for Gephi remains focused on a few fundamentals, which were already outlined in our Manifesto back in 2009. Gephi should be a software for everyone, powerful yet easy to learn. In many ways, we still have the impression that we’ve only scratched the surface and want to continue to focus on making each module of Gephi better. As part of this release, we’ve undertaken one of the most difficult project we’ve worked on and completely rewrote the core of Gephi. Although not very visible for the end-user, this brings new capabilities, better performance and a level of code quality we can be proud of. This ensure a very solid foundation for the future of this software and paves the way for a future 1.0 version.
Below is an overview of the new features and improvements the 0.9 version will bring.
Java and MacOS compatibility
This release will restore Gephi’s compatibility with the latest Java versions on all platforms. This will resolve issues our users encounter with Java 7 and 8. Compatibility issues with Mac OS will also be resolved and full support for Retina display screens added.
New redeveloped core
This release will improve performance and reliability by a large margin. The graph structure at Gephi’s core has been redeveloped from scratch and will bring multiple new features, better performance and lower memory consumption. On benchmarks, simple operations such as reading nodes or setting attributes see performance improvements ranging from 2X to 100X. This new core will make many operations in Gephi faster and push the envelope even further in large graphs exploration. Reducing memory usage has also been an area of focus and we have measured a 2X reduction compared to Gephi 0.8.2 on a medium-size graph.
New Appearance module
We’re introducing a new user module named Appearance designed to combine and replace Ranking and Partition modules. Appearance will group in one place all controls acting on the node or edge appearance. The partition capabilities will also greatly improve as part of this new module and a new palette selector is being added. In addition of the default palettes, we’re also adding a cool palette generator designed to find the optimal colors (i.e. partitions can be differentiated from each other). Moreover, it will be possible to “Auto-apply” partitions as well, which is a feature that was only available for Ranking so far.
Timestamp support
This 0.9 release adds a new way to represent networks over time: timestamps. So far, users could only represent time using intervals and that was cumbersome when the underlying network data was collected at fixed time intervals (e.g. one network per day). Starting with this release, Gephi will support both intervals and timestamps to represent evolving network topology and/or evolving attribute values.
GEXF 1.3 support
The GEXF format is also evolving to its 1.3 version. This version improves the support for graphs over time and introduces the ability to represent time using timestamps rather than intervals. In addition, it’s now possible to set a timestamp or an interval for the entire graph, allowing building collections of GEXF files where each represents a “slice”. This is a common request from the community and we hope this will greatly facilitate the exploration of longitudinal networks.
Multiple files import
With the 0.9 version users will be able to import multiple files in Gephi at the same time. Once the files have been read, two choices are offered, either to import each file into a separate workspace or merge them into the same workspace. The latter is a powerful option when used with dynamic graphs. Indeed, a collection of GEXF files representing the same network over time will be imported in Gephi in a single step.
Multi-graph support
This release will bring support for multi-graphs, where multiple edges can exist between two nodes each with a different relationship. Users will be able to import, filter and run algorithms on these graphs but the support for visualizing these graphs will come in a further release.
New workspace selection UI
We’ve heard users’ feedback and the workspace selection user interface will be improved. The new interface will be a “tab-style” interface where each workspace is a tab and switching from one workspace to another only requires a single click. Tabs will be located at the top just under the perspective selection. The previous interface is located at the bottom right corner and will be entirely removed.
Gephi Toolkit release
A new release of the Gephi Toolkit, based on the 0.9 version will be made soon after December 20th.
Bug fixes
We’ve done a serious bug squash and already addressed many difficult issues, more to come until the release date.
Follow us on Twitter or join the Facebook group to get the latest news. If you want to know more about this upcoming release, or want to help out please send us a note.