dbgraphnav up

Paul McMillan has been working hard at his dbgraphnav Google Summer of Code project, and it's now pretty much ready to use. I've installed it on TreeTapper (see an example here). This allows navigation of author and reference relationships, a visual complement to the coauthor and reference tables already present. It's a general tool allowing navigation of relational databases with a lot of user configuration options. After all Paul's work, and our frequent IRC conversations, it's good to see it running. One nice aspect of it is caching: GraphViz takes a long time to draw graphs, and there's a user-set option to cache by time or by using diff to only update graphs that have changed (the latter works remarkably fast). I'll be firing off a few scripts tonight to generate cached files for all the people and references in the database to make it easier for people to use.

One aspect of the project I've been disappointed by is GraphViz itself. When I proposed this project, it seemed like the logical choice to use, but I've been amazed at some of its limitations. For example, on graphs with many nodes, using "neato" layout (an undirected graph layout), some nodes are far from the rest of the graph (see Michael Donoghue's TreeTapper page for an example). This results in nodes in the center being tightly clumped while nodes at the edges have far too much whitespace around them. No matter what options we've tried for desired edge length, spring parameter, etc., we just can't make GraphViz pull those far off nodes in. Any suggestions? Other than that sort of annoyance, though, this should be a very useful addition to TreeTapper and perhaps other websites as well.

Google summer of code

For Google Summer of Code, NESCent had 11 project ideas, 31 applicants, and just 5 slots. Paul McMillan, an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley, was one of the applicants and proposed working on the WebDot navigation of databases project (though he might end up using GraphViz directly, rather than WebDot). His application was detailed and showed good background knowledge; more impressive were his conversations (over IRC) regarding the problem, where it became evident that he had given it a lot of thought and certainly had the background to do this. This project should help with TreeTapper navigation (looking at coauthor networks, for example) and become an easy-to-use solution for other website developers. Congrats to Paul. 

This was my first year with Google Summer of Code. I was impressed by the quality of the applications NESCent-affiliated projects received and how passionate the students are about them (several whose projects didn't get funding have volunteered to work on them anyway, which is amazing (since they'll have to do something else for money, and  so will have less time)).

Google summer of code

NESCent is a hosting organization for Google Summer of Code; I've proposed a project to make a tool to allow databases to be navigated visually (essentially by combining WebDot (part of GraphViz) with something like sqlt-diagram, but for navigating table entries rather than just looking at the schema). Only one interested student so far; if it's not funded, I'll likely do it myself later for TreeTapper.