[Visinfo] Week 2 response: JUNG

[Zachary M. Davis]

JUNG is the Java Universal Network/Graph Framework.  It is an open 
source programming library written in Java with the goal of providing a 
framework for analysis and visualization of data.  Because it is 
derived from the Java API, JUNG shares in some of the inherent benefits 
of Java, namely portability and superior documentation.  JUNG also 
seems to have an active community behind it, which is alway useful for 
any programming library.  Although I have not had the chance to work 
with JUNG myself yet, it seems that it is ideal for prototyping 
visualizations. It provides several data analysis algorithms that could 
be used for a variety of different datasets.  It also provides 
visualization tools, including, it appears, several ready-made 
algorithm-visualization combinations as well as the ability to 
customize.  I feel that this framework would be extremely useful for 
exploring several visualization and/or analysis methods with minimal 
effort.  Once the basic program had been written to get the data and 
interface the analysis results with the visualization, it seems that it 
would be fairly trivial to essentially plug in different algorithms or 
visualizations.  I think this would be an excellent prototyping tool 
for people with at least some basic Java programming knowledge.

-- 
Zachary Davis
zmd at umail.ucsb.edu