Loomio
Thu 21 Dec 2017 3:37AM

Visualisation design ideas

H Hugi Ásgeirsson Public Seen by 18

Even though it's not our top priority right now, I just implemented graph visualisation because that's what I felt like doing. Hooray for immediacy!

After some google-fu and ritual sacrifices to the gods of javascript libraries, I went for vis.js, which is a specialised library for visualising graphs and networks. That someone has been good enough to make a vis.js react component also played a part in that choice.

I had to write a little helper library to get our data into the right shape and extract a local graph, and that might come in handy later if we want to show larger sub-graphs.

A great thing about vis.js is that it's very easy to style and customise. We can pretty much make graph look and behave as we like it to. There are some examples on the vis.js website that are a good starting point.

So, graphs, what do we want in the future? How should they look and behave?

RL

Ronja Lofstad Fri 29 Dec 2017 6:08PM

I think the attached file is a pretty neat starting point? I imagnie the "physics" option with the solver forceAtlas2Based would be a neat way of organisig the nodes if the aim is to highligt clusters of related nodes? The "data manipulation interface" would probably be a pretty handy way to add nodes that are going to have many connections. Not sure if it should be available to all or just guides though..? (or none). The clustering possibilities are nice for getting an overview, but maybe it is too much for people to process.
If we are going to make a master map that is going to be available at the actual event, I think the option to import a file from Gephi would look best. I would love to make one :)

H

Hugi Ásgeirsson Fri 29 Dec 2017 6:37PM

You can actually play around with it now at http://realities.theborderland.se/

H

Hugi Ásgeirsson Fri 29 Dec 2017 6:39PM

And as for a master map at the actual event, how about a big flatscreen touch display? :D