Key Outcomes
- Designed a prototype visualisation tool to display graph information in 3D.
- Gained understanding of uses for various graph plotting and visualisation libraries.
- Tool was used by a different internal team to aid them in their own network visualisation endeavors.
More Information
Working at a company where there was a large dataset that could be represented in a network structure made me interested in exploring tools and technologies that could aid with visualising this data and being able to understand and explore it better. I explored different libraries and packages that could aid in plotting network structures (such as Plotly, iGraph, Gephi, NetworkX, D3, WebGL, three.js) and subsequently built a prototype interactive 3D visualisation tool using 3d-force-graph, a JavaScript module that uses three.js to allow 3D rendering of force directed graphs. The tool allows users to input JSON data (specifying nodes and links) and will generate a graph that can then be manipulated and explored.
With the larger network structures we were working with, it was always difficult to explore specific sections of the network visually and effectively convey to stakeholders information from the network. The interactive tool I built was used to display interesting parts of the larger network structures and help stakeholders view and understand how components at different levels interacted with each other. This tool was subsequently used by a different area of the business as well to visualise their own network data.
