Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Introducing Google Instant
Saturday, January 1, 2011
NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration in Excel
NodeXL is a powerful and easy-to-use interactive network visualisation and analysis tool that leverages the widely available MS Excel application as the platform for representing generic graph data, performing advanced network analysis and visual exploration of networks. The tool supports multiple social network data providers that import graph data (nodes and edge lists) into the Excel spreadsheet.
The tool includes an Excel template for easy manipulation of graph data:
Sample networks generated with NodeXL:
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Project contributers:
The NodeXL Template in Action
This is what the NodeXL template looks like. In this example, a simple two-column edge list was entered into the Edges worksheet, and the Show Graph button was clicked to display the network graph in the graph pane on the right.
The two-column edge list is all that’s required, but you can extensively customize the graph’s appearance by filling in a variety of optional edge and vertex columns. Here is the same graph after color, shape, size, image, opacity, and other columns were filled in.
In the next example, NodeXL has imported and displayed a graph of connections among people who follow, reply or mention one another in Twitter:
Some NodeXL Features
NodeXL Graph Gallery
Here are some graphs that were created with NodeXL. Additional images can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/sets/72157622437066929/.
John Crowley | Cody Dunne |
Marc Smith | Pierre de Vries |
Eduarda Mendes Rodrigues | Tony Capone |
Tony Capone | Eduarda Mendes Rodrigues |
Project Trident: A Scientific Workflow Workbench
With Project Trident, you can author workflows visually by using a catalog of existing activities and complete workflows. The workflow workbench provides a tiered library that hides the complexity of different workflow activities and services for ease of use.
Version 1.2 Now Available
Project Trident is available under the Apache 2.0 open source license.
About Project Trident
Built on the Windows Workflow Foundation, this scientific workflow workbench allows users to:
- Automate analysis and then visualize and explore data
- Compose, run, and catalog experiments as workflows
- Capture provenance for each experiment
- Create a domain-specific workflow library to extend the functionality of the workflow workbench
- Use existing services, such as provenance and fault tolerance, or add new services
- Schedule workflows over HPC clusters or cloud computing resources
Current Status: Microsoft Research is working in partnership with oceanographers involved in the NEPTUNE project at the University of Washington and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, to use Project Trident as a scientific workflow workbench. A workflow workbench prototype has been developed for evaluation and is in active use, while an open source version is being implemented for public release.
Learn More
Project Trident in Action—Videos
- NEPTUNE on the Research Channel
John Delaney, School of Oceanography, NEPTUNE program director, Jerome M. Paros Endowed Chair for Sensor Networks, University of Washington. (approximately 27 minutes) - Project Trident and Windows Workflow Foundation at PDC 2008
Jared Jackson demonstrates the Composer as a use case for custom designers in session TL 17–"WF 4.0: A First Look" by Kenny Wolf. To view the session, click Speakers, and then click Kenny Wolf's name at the end of the list. (approximately 10 minutes)
See also PDC slide presentation
Papers, Presentations, and Articles
- Trident: A Scientific Workflow Workbench
Roger Barga, Dean Guo, Jared Jackson, and Nelson Araujo - Trident Workbench: A Scientific Workflow System
Whitepaper presenting architecture and design details - Managing Scientific Workflows
Tools, software components, and presentations from Microsoft Research - Building Scientific Workflow Systems for Data Management in the Cloud
Project Trident eScience 2008 abstract - The Trident Scientific Workflow Workbench
Project Trident eScience 2008 demo - Microsoft Research: Trident Workbench for Zissou Wannabees
What others say about Project Trident: A Scientific Workflow Workbench - Scientific Workflows at GRADD 2008
Project Trident presentation at Global Reach Alliance for Digital Data
Partner Highlight
myExperiment team
University of Manchester and Southampton University. myExperiment makes it easy to find, use and share scientific workflows and other files, and to build communities. Project Trident uses myExperiment as the community site for sharing workflows, along with provenance traces.
Background: Project Trident
Project Trident: A Scientific Workflow Workbench began as a collaborative scientific and engineering partnership among the University of Washington, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and Microsoft External Research that is intended to provide Project Neptune with a scientific-workflow workbench for oceanography. Later, Project Trident was deployed at Johns Hopkins University for use in the Pan-STARRS astronomy project.
An increasing number of tools and databases in the sciences are available as Web services. As a result, researchers face not only a data deluge, but also a service deluge, and need a tool to organize, curate, and search for services of value to their research. Project Trident provides a registry that enables the scientist to include services from his or her particular domain. The registry enables a researcher to search on tags, keywords, and annotations to determine which services and workflows—and even which data sets—are available. Other features of the registry include:
- Semantic tagging to enable a researcher to find a service based on what it does, or is meant to do, and what it consumes as inputs and produces as outputs
- Annotations that allow a researcher to understand how to operate the registry and configure it correctly; the registry records when and by whom a service was created, records its version history, and tracks its version
The Project Trident registry service includes a harvester that automatically extracts Web Services Descriptive Language (WSDL) for a service, to allow scientists to use any service as it was presented. Users simply provide the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) of the service, and the harvester extracts the WSDL and creates an entry in the registry for the service. Curation tools are available to review and semantically describe the service before moving it to the public area of the registry.
Because the end users for Project Trident are scientists rather than seasoned programmers, the workflow workbench also offers a graphical interface that enables the user to visually compose, launch, monitor, and administer workflows.
Project Trident: Logical Architecture