--version | -V
Displays the version of the program.--help | -H
Displays a short help message.file.net
The name of the file you want to open.A Social Network is the social structure which facilitates communication between a group of actors (individuals or organizations) that are related somehow (i.e. by common interests, shared values, financial exchanges, friendship, dislike, etc). For instance, your friends and you form a social network. But, social networks operate on many more levels, from family relations and disease spreading up to the level of company strategies, social movements or even nations. Furthermore, research in many scientific areas has shown that social networks are important when we study the way problems are solved, diseases are spreaded, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals.
Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a beautiful blend of Sociology and Mathematics, composed of various interdisciplinary techniques for the study of such social networks. SNA researchers conceptualize social relationships in terms of nodes and edges (links) in mathematical graphs. Nodes represent the individual actors within the networks, while edges visualise the relationships between those actors. The result is graph-based structures which are often very complex.
Social Networks Visualizer (SocNetV) is our project to build a flexible and user-friendly, cross-platform tool for the analysis and visualisation of social networks, targeting primarily the researcher. SocNetV lets you construct social networks with a few clicks on a virtual canvas or load networks of various formats (GraphML, GraphViz, Adjacency (Sociomatrix), Pajek, UCINET, etc) and modify them to suit your needs.
The application can compute all the basic network properties, such as graph diameter, and geodesic distances (shortest path lengths), as well as more advanced structural statistics, such as node and network centrality and prestige indices (i.e. Closeness Centrality, Betweeness Centrality, Proximity Prestige, etc), clustering and triads (clustering coefficient, triad census) etc.
Various layout algorithms (i.e. Energy-based, in circles and in levels according to various centrality indeces) are supported for meaningful visualisations of your networks. Furthermore, random networks (Erdos-Renyi, Watts-Strogatz, ring lattice, etc) can be created with a few clicks.
SocNetV is a work in progress and is being developed in C++ and Qt, an open-source, multiplatform GUI development toolkit.
You can run SocNetV on Linux, OS X and Windows. To download and easily install SocNetV, there are binary packages available and instructions in the project webiste "Downloads" area.
The latest version of SocNetV can be found at http://socnetv.sourceforge.net. It is distributed both in source code and binary packages for Linux distributions, and executables for Windows. Mac OS X users may run SocNetV either through a disk image prepared by us, or by using the Fink project. See instructions below.
In any Linux distribution, to compile SocNetV from source code, you need the Qt5 and QtWebKit development libraries installed - most Linux distros offer Qt5 via their package manager. At the least, you will need the following packages:
- openSUSE: libqt5-qtbase, libqt5-qtbase-devel, libqt5-qttools, libQt5WebKit5, libQt5WebKit5-devel
- Fedora: qt5-qtbase,qt5-qtbase-devel, qt5-qttools, qt5-qtwebkit, qt5-qtwebkit-devel
If you have Qt5 and QtWebKit installed, download the archive with the source code from the Downloads menu, untar it, enter the new directory, and compile with the following commands:
tar zxfv SocNetV-1.XX.tar.gz
cd socnetv
qmake
make
sudo make install
In Windows, to compile SocNetV, you need to have installed Qt5 development files, and a compiler, like MinGW. If you wish you can avoid compilation, by using the Windows XP executables we offer (see below).
To avoid compiling in Linux, we also offer binary packages for Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Mandriva and openSUSE available from the project's website. Debian users may prefer the SocNetV version in the debian unstable repository.
For Debian & Debian-derived distros, a (not always updated) version of SocNetV is in the 'stable' repository (thanks to Serafeim Zanikolas). Add the line:
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ stable main
to your sources.list; save it, then type in:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install socnetv
Ubuntu users may use our repository.
All you have to do is add the following lines in your /etc/apt/sources.list file:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/dimitris-kalamaras/ppa/ubuntu "version" main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/dimitris-kalamaras/ppa/ubuntu "version" main
where "version" is your version of Ubuntu, i.e. gutsy.
Then save it, exit the text editor, and type in:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install socnetv
This repository is signed with 61AE869C37A4FCC5A73FD02EE088941209CFE071 OpenPGP key. Until you add the PPA's key to your own system, you'll see warnings that you're downloading from an untrusted source. To add our PPA's key to your system, open a terminal and enter this command:
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 61AE869C37A4FCC5A73FD02EE088941209CFE071
If you want more information about keys and repository signing in Ubuntu, read the official instructions.
For openSUSE and Novell SLED, you may download binary RPM packages from our our repository. When you download the RPM, become root user and install it, like this:
su rpm -ivh socnetv-1.1-1.i586.rpm
Fedora and RedHat users may download binary RPM packages from our our repository. Afterwards, become root user and install the package, i.e.:
su rpm -ivh socnetv-1.1-1.i586.rpm
Markos Chandras (hwoarang) added SocNetV into the 'qting-edge' overlay, which also houses new Qt4 and KDE4 software. To install the qting-edge overlay type in this command:
layman -a qting-edge
To run SocNetV in Windows, just download the latest SocNetV zip for Windows from the Downloads menu, unzip it, and double-click on the "socnetv" executable. The program will run immediately. Warning: the Windows version is not properly tested. But feel free to notify us for any bugs you encounter!
If you are a Mac user, you can download and run SocNetV from a disk image (dmg file). Head over to project's "Downloads" area, download the .dmg file. Once downloaded, double click on it and the double click on the SocNetV executable which will appear inside the disk image. Alternatively, you may install and run SocNetV using Fink. Fink is like "bringing linux to Mac" - you install some base programs and files, and then you can install applications like SocNetV. Please note that we do not maintain nor support the SocNetV version in Fink! Anyway, SocNetV is in the unstable section of Fink. Therefore, you will need to configure Fink to use the unstable. You'll find usefull instructions for this here: http://www.finkproject.org/faq/usage-fink.php#unstable After that, you only need commands like these (I think!):
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install socnetv
If you want to test the latest/current development version of SocNetV, check it out using this command (you need the git package installed in your computer):
git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/socnetv/git socnetv-git
or download the latest tarball from the Sourceforge git repository. Then, type in the commands:
cd trunk
qmake
make
socnetv
Please note that this version is not always stable.
--version | -V
Displays the version of the program.--help | -H
Displays a short help message.file.net
The name of the file you want to open.