![]() (Interesting side note: when I tried to install the very same Gephi 0.8.2-beta release on my Windows 7 virtual machine it ran perfectly fine with the Java 7 installed there…) Since I’m working with quite extensive network graphs in my research I really wanted to have Gephi run natively (well, kind of, since it’s still Java…) on my Mac for memory reasons. I don’t blame them! The interesting thing is that this poses quite a problem, since Gephi in its latest release 0.8.2 is not able to run on those MacOS X systems with Java 7 installed. Basically using such software doesn’t sound like a good idea, but in the case of Gephi there’s no way around it: it’s developed by a non-profit organization (the Gephi Consortium) and therefore doesn’t really have the means (in monetary terms) or the manpower to keep up with this kind of fast-moving developments. The problems start when you try to run a Java-based application that requires Java 6 on one of these machines. I think this is true for everything from 10.6 Snow Leopard, but may be wrong here, but definitely from 10.7 Lion and upwards (10.8 Mountain Lion and also 10.9 Mavericks). Nowadays MacOS X has complete control over the Java installed and running on more recent MacOS X systems. This sounds like a good thing, and it definitely is in terms of security. With the release of Java 7 Oracle stopped publishing Java 6 for the MacOS X platform completely. Oracle) releases of Java 6 insecure and therefore started to publish their own. Basically Apple deemed the official (i.e. ![]() Now, this should make MacOS X users already listen up, since the story of Java on MacOS X has not been an easy one over the past few months year or so. It’s a Java-based application and hence available for a number of platforms, including Windows, MacOS and Linux. ![]() This is a software for Exploratory Data Analysis, a paradigm appeared in the Visual Analytics field of research. It is a complementary tool to traditional statistics, as visual thinking with interactive interfaces is now recognized to facilitate reasoning. The goal is to help data analysts to make hypothesis, intuitively discover patterns, isolate structure singularities or faults during data sourcing. Like Photoshop but for data, the user interacts with the representation, manipulate the structures, shapes and colors to reveal hidden properties. Gephi is a tool for people that have to explore and understand graphs. Gephi is an open source graph visualization and analysis software. While these warrant some more in-depth articles in themselves, here I’d like to put a more technical focus on a really annoying problem when using Gephi on a more recent MacOS X system. I used their Network Analyst Extension and also the Urban Network Analysis toolbox by the City Form Lab at the MIT/ SUTD for a more scientific application: the calculation of centrality measures. So far the tools in ESRI ArcGIS have been sufficient for what I was trying to achieve.
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