What is Gephi? Meet this useful network analysis tool

By Dr. Verónica Espinoza, 2022

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Gephi is the leading visualization and exploration software for all kinds of graphs and networks. Gephi is open-source and free.

¿What is Gephi?

Gephi is a tool for data analysts and scientists keen to explore and understand graphs. Like Photoshop™ but for graph data, the user interacts with the representation, manipulate the structures, shapes and colors to reveal hidden patterns. The goal is to help data analysts to make hypothesis, intuitively discover patterns, isolate structure singularities or faults during data sourcing. It is a complementary tool to traditional statistics, as visual thinking with interactive interfaces is now recognized to facilitate reasoning. This is a software for Exploratory Data Analysis, a paradigm appeared in the Visual Analytics field of research.

Architecture

The modular architecture allows developers adding and extending features with ease by developing plug-ins. Gephi can also be used as Java library in other applications and build for instance, a layout server.

Figure 1. Gephi Architecture.

Lean more about Gephi Architecture here.

Gephi project was born in 2006 with a prototype called Graphiltre, at a sociology research program…
Find the full story told by its initiator, Mathieu Jacomy on this blog.

Gephi interface

Main sections of Gephi.

Figure 2. Three different ways of working with data. (Image by the author)

Figure 3. Different sections to work your networks. (Image by the author)

Applications

Gephi has many applications in various disciplinary fields. A summary is shown below.

Figure 4. Gephi applications (Image by the author).

Features

The features that Gephi has are extensive. Gephi integrates features such as: real-time network visualization, metrics, dynamic filters, layouts, dynamic network visualizations and much more.

Table 1. Gephi Features (Table by the author).

Plugins

The built-in Plugins Center automatically gets the list of plugins available from the Gephi Plugin portal and takes care of all software updates. There are dozens of community-built plugins that extends Gephi’s functionalities.

Figure 5. Location of Gephi plugins.

Below is the currently list of Gephi Plugins. (Update november, 2022)

Table 2. List of Gephi Plugins, (Table by the author).

Learn more about Gephi plugins

Do you want to learn how to use Gephi?

Here is a list of resources.

🎓 Tutorials

There are many tutorials that can help you get into the world of Gephi. You can explore official resources such as:

1. -Quick Start
2. Tutorial Visualization
3. Tutorial Layouts.

You can find popular tutorials by the community, videos and more here

Find a great contribution of tutorials from Clément Levallois here.

Interesting tutorials and posts about Gephi on Martin Grandjean’s website.

In the website Mapping Controversies by Anders K. Munk & Mathieu Jacomy, you can find a set of interesting tutorials in this section: Build annotated network maps with Gephi, 4 hours

On the other hand, I have written the following tutorials in Medium:

1. What is Gephi? Meet this useful network analysis tool.
2. Are you a beginner in Gephi? Make your first network now!
3. Learn how to make a network in Gephi-Lite and add images to the nodes (I give you the gexf file!)
4. How to publish your Gephi network to the web.
5. Link Prediction Plugin for Gephi.
6. Position Ranking Plugin for Gephi,
7. How to visualize a Spotify Network in Gephi in just a few steps!
8. How to use Word Cloud plugin for Gephi
9. Meet the Gephi color palette and make beautiful visualizations
10. Groups by Partition Plugin for Gephi: “Each node is the aggregation of a group of nodes”
11. Generate a GEXF file from text with ChatGPT and visualize it in Gephi and NodeXL
12. Transform any text into a semantic network with Nocodefunctions App (in just 4 steps)
13. Turn a list of sources and their targets into a network with Nocodefunctions App (and visualize it in Gephi)

📚Books & PhD thesis

The author Ken Cherven has contributed two wonderful books that you can find on Amazon:

1. -Network Graph Analysis and Visualization with Gephi
2. Mastering Gephi Network Visualization

Also the author Devangana Khokhar has published this book on Amazon: Gephi Cookbook.

Read for free Mathieu Jacomy PhD thesis: Situating Visual Network Analysis (2021)

🧍Follow the Gephi community on the different social networks like: Gephi FB group, Twitter and Reddit.

🗄️Datasets

The Gephi sample datasets are available in various formats (GEXF, GDF, GML, NET, GraphML, DL, DOT).

💻System Requirements Specification Document. A document contributed by Konstantinos Varvoutas.

📥Download Gephi here

👍Thanks for reading and enjoy this wonderful tool!

😃Here is my (x) Twitter and 3 posters I made about Gephi. Take a look!

REFERENCES

1.-Bastian M., Heymann S., Jacomy M. (2009). Gephi: an open source software for exploring and manipulating networks. International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

2.- Gephi — The Open Graph Viz Platform [Internet]. [cited Nov 8, 2022]. Available in: https://gephi.org/

3.-Let’s try a Dataset in Gephi (Hands-on activity) [Internet]. Network Analysis and Visualization. [cited Nov 8, 2022]. Available in: https://ubc-library-rc.github.io/gephi-palladio/content/05_Gephi_hands_on_activity.html

4.-Intro to the Gephi codebase by Mathieu Bastian — YouTube [Internet]. [cited 2022 Dec 3]. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OVQQACjLck