Mathieu Jacomy

Looking back at 4 years of Open research tools and technologies devroom, we propose an open discussion on what's been done and what's to do. The panel will be held by the devroom organisers and will present a brief wrap-up of the 2023 edition, before opening the floor to the attendance. We are looking for feedback regarding the event itself, and inputs about its part in the community. Where are we, and where should we go from here?

Other people: Paul Girard Matthieu Totet Diego Antolinos-Basso Maya Anderson-González Sara Petti

Gephi is a popular open source network visualization software. In this talk we propose to share how we build the future of Gephi on two levels: the code, and the rest.

For two years, we have been making efforts to sustain Gephi over the long term. The threats to the project are sometimes about the code, sometimes not: what if a library we use, and is no longer maintained, becomes incompatible with the latest MacOS? What if the few people who know the codebase get out of the project, and we cannot transfer that knowledge to new devs? What if we fail to recruit new developers?

There is a lot of good will around Gephi, and yet making the project healthy is not easy because the path to sustainability is not obvious. This is the discussion we want to have with developers, both to share what works, and to get some feedback to improve. We are not there yet, and we struggle to recruit Java developers.

This talk will be given by two co-founders of the project, Mathieu Bastian, the historic architect of the Gephi codebase, and Mathieu Jacomy, the designer of Gephi and a researcher in network visualization.

In short, the topics we want to touch upon are: * What is the Gephi road map and why is it how it is * The path to funding the project * Our "Gephi code sustainability retreats", where they shined, where they failed * The relation we build two communities: the users, and the devs. * Documenting the codebase and engaging developers * How the Gephi project acknowledges the web as a platform (Gephi Lite)

Other people: Mathieu Bastian

Discussion between Standards panel's speakers.

Other people: Peter Selby Manuel Spitschan

Discussion between the Policies panel speakers.

Other people: Bastien Teresa Gomez-Diaz

The Open Research Tools and Technologies devroom managers welcome words announcing the schedule.

This years the Open Research devroom schedule has been organized in thematic panels:

• Academics developing software testimonies panel
• Visual inquiries panel
• Policies panel
• Artificial Intelligence Panel
• Open Hardware Panel
• Standards panel
• Knowledge management communities panel
• Open Data Panel

Other people: Paul Girard Matthieu Totet Célya Gruson-Daniel Yo Yehudi Maya Anderson-González Sara Petti

Gephi is a popular network analysis open source software written in Java. This talk about its future is a joint effort by the Gephi dev team and Javascript experts to explore the issues and opportunities of web technologies for large-scale network analysis and visualization.

Gephi relies on the Swing library for the general user interface plus an OpenGL insert for network visualization. This choice made more than 10 years ago was one of the very few options available for a multiplatform software able to harness GPU power for displaying millions of nodes and edges. Despite a number of issues, the situation was considered relatively satisfying.

However two long-term trends force the Gephi dev team to reconsider its future: computer infrastructures are moving away from true multiplatform software to web-based interfaces, and Java is moving away from user interface development to server-side computation. Most if not all UX developers agree that web technologies are better supporting modern UX design than the Java ecosystem. However the specific use of OpenGL puts Gephi is a special situation. We know from user surveys that scaling up your network is key to most users. No Gephi user has only small networks, and many of them has tried to analyze networks with hundred thousands nodes or more. This use case is far from usual in the world of web technologies. Is WebGL up to the task of visualizing such amount of objects?

We used existing Javascript libraries to build a stack comparable to the basic features of Gephi. Graphology was used as a Javascript equivalent of Gephi's GraphStore library, and a tweaked version of Sigma JS WebGL renderer was used as display engine. We used this prototype to benchmark the performance of web technologies for rendering large graphs in OpenGL.

In parallel we explored the possibility to keep the project in the Java world but stop relying on the JOGL library that is at risk of being less and less maintained. In this mind we developed a new OpenGL visualisation engine prototype, with a better code base and better performance than current implementation.

In this talk we will showcase both the Javascript proof-of-concept and the new Java prototype. We will present state of our reflections and the results of our benchmarks. Of course technological choices are not only (and even not primarily) a question of performance, and we will take the time to discuss the various issues and limits we met in this exercise of prospective technological exploration. we will conclude with a broader reflection on how Gephi as an open source project tries to adapt to global technological changes.

We expect this talk to be useful to Java and/or Javascript developers/engineers dealing with graphs.

Eduardo Ramos Ibáñez is lead developer of Gephi Mathieu Jacomy is co-author of Gephi Alexis Jacomy is co-author of the Sigma JS library Guillaume Plique is author of Graphology and co-author of Sigma JS