Information Aesthetics has a good review of popular open-source network visualization tool ‘Gephi’, running it through a few sample datasets and eventually recreating the famous Minardi diagram. In the end, he’s impressed but sees plenty of room for improvement.
Overall, Gephi is a useful and interesting tool. It allows you to explore, create, and analyze network graphs in a fairly easy way. It offers many visualization options for any type of network and supports up to one million nodes and edges.
There are some plugins available for Gephi that extend the functionality. I used one called GeoLayout to make the Minard graph below.
The only thing keeping Gephi from being a professional grade tool is its bugginess and lack of documentation. If its development community can sustain it, Gephi should be able to improve and become a more robust software tool.
via Data Visualization Review: Gephi, Free Graph Exploration Software – information aesthetics.
