.NetMap – Using Excel, or embedded control, to graph and visualize connections, networks (social), degrees of separation, associations, etc

Dan on eScience & Technical Computing @ Microsoft - .NetMap - Released - visualize your Networks (Social, etc) from Excel

“.NetMap an Excel plugin and dll is now available (Binaries and Source) on CodePlex – This brings the ability to visualize different types of networks – ie. Social networks (facebook, etc) and even things like Protein interaction network (see image).  What’s great is that you can do this directly from within Excel – which makes it easy to use for anyone.  The other neat piece of the add-in is that it will analyze your email (Outlook, Outlook Express, etc) and then you can use the NetMap chart to see who sends you a ton of email .  You can also embed the class libraries in other apps to visualize your graphs…I’d like to hear about other possible Science applications of graph visualizations…and who will be the first to create a SilverLight app using the libraries.  

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CodePlex - .NetMap

“.NetMap is a pair of applications for viewing network graphs, along with a set of .NET Framework 2.0 class libraries that can be used to add network graphs to custom applications.

A network graph is a series of vertices (sometimes called nodes) connected by edges. See this Wikipedia article for an overview of network graphs.
.NetMap was created by Marc Smith's team at Microsoft Research.

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Email Analysis

If you use Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, or a similar email client, and if you have Windows Desktop Search installed on your computer (it comes with Vista and can be installed separately on Windows XP), you can use the Excel 2007 template's "Analyze Email Network" Ribbon command to graph the network of people you communicate with via email.

Standalone Desktop Application

In addition to the Excel 2007 template, the source code includes a standalone desktop application for viewing network graphs. The application reads graph data from either a Pajek file or a simple edge-list text file. The degree of graph customization is much more limited in the desktop application than with the Excel 2007 template.

Class Libraries

The Excel 2007 template and the desktop application display graphs using a custom Windows Forms control that can also be used in other applications. In fact, the template is just a Visual Studio Tools for Office 3.0 wrapper around a stack of reusable, prebuilt class libraries.
The Windows Forms control is one of several graph "visualizers" that are packaged in a Microsoft.NetMap.Visualization assembly. There is also a Microsoft.NetMap.Adapters assembly for reading and writing graph data in various formats, a Microsoft.SocialNetworkLib assembly for analyzing social networks, and a Microsoft.NetMap.Core assembly that implements the low-level vertex, edge, and graph classes. The framework for a Microsoft.NetMap.Algorithms assembly is also provided, although most of the graph algorithms are still work items as of May 2008.

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Dude, that’s just cool… I HAVE to find a way to use this. Did you note the “You can also embed the class libraries in other apps to visualize your graphs” statement? What’s the license you ask? MS-PL!

I need to see if I can add this to my Blogger Backup utility to graph post relationships and I wonder if we couldn’t use this at work…

Let the network diagramming fun begin!

(via The Road to Know Where - Microsoft's CodePlex Releases Excel 2007 "NetMap" Template)