wectar labs

Welcome to wectar labs. This page is meant to open the door to our lab, the place where we do things which really bake our noodles - visualizing the interrelated data we are generating with our wectar engine. On the right you can see what became our lab logo straight away, the first wectar interrelation visualization we generated with cytopescape. What is visualized are wectar's hundred most popular web sites and their interrelationship within the wectarian web.

There are three branches in our lab, focusing respectively on

generating grand pictures of the wectar network in order to impress you
implementing interactive visualization of the wectar network with the visualization toolkit flare
offering partial data dumps of our web site interrelation insight to the public in order to feed the hunger of other interrelation addicts

We decided to open this door as early as possible even so we haven't really found time to make everything nice and tidy. And in a way we not really aspire for it, so please expect loose reflections of our creative work in progress on this page.

grand pictures

That is fun and for that matter should come first. Images of our web site network insights we are generating. At the moment we are using two wonderful freely available software gems for that purpose

cytopescape - an open source bioinformatics software platform for visualizing molecular interaction networks
yEd Graph Editor - the free graph editor from yworks

Other tools like processing are on our agenda.

Not many pictures and not too mind blowing yet. Nevertheless please enjoy the quick overview here, get curious and best jump directly to our flickr photostream.

interactive visualization

Whatever comes out of this branch of our lab will most likely be integrated in our web site sooner or later. The first fruit, the beta version of the wectar related viewer, is already published and available in our directory listings.

This viewer is part of our research on finding new ways to organize and visualize web sites and their interrelationship. It is implemented with the wonderful flare visualization toolkit and embedded into the equally wonderful puremvc framework. A discussion about the integration of the flare toolkit into the puremvc framework has just started, interested developers are invited to join this discussion and other flare related debates in the flare assistance pool FLAP. (flare-puremvc thread in FLAP)

data dumps

To start with we want to share the following three extracts from our database with you.

These graphml files contain the 100 (1000,5000) most popular wectar listed web sites and their ten most relevant relations in the pool of websites in wectar. The first file describes a graph with 669 nodes and 1000 edges, the second a graph with 3766 nodes and 10000 edges. The third graphml file contains 9354 nodes and 50.000 edges. For people new to graph visualization we highly recommend to start with the smallest graph file to get a feeling for the software you are using to interpret the graph. Starting with the second and for sure with the third you might push your personal computer already to its limits.

These three files are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

The following attribution has to be included on every public web page making use of this data.

<a href="http:/wectar.com">web site relations by wectar.com<a>

The graphml files offered by wectar contain only the URLs of the websites and their relation. If you want to enrich this data please notice that

all sites are part of the Open Directory Project ODP - get the Open Directory RDF Dump to fill the data sets with further informations
all sites are listed at delicious.com - use the delicious API for further enrichment

We hope that you are enjoying to play around with this data. We are planning to regularly update this data in order to reflect our growing knowledge of the interrelation of wectar listed web sites. Please don't force us to stop this service by disregarding our license agreements. Also if you use further informations from the open directory project or delicious.com, please do this in conformity with their given terms of service. Wectar considers itself as a partner of these great web services and we wouldn't accept any misuse of our data in connection with these two web services. Thanks.

For the case you are inspired yet new to the field of graph visualization you might want to have a look at the very basic interactive Actionscript/Flare application we put together in order to serve as a stepping stone for interrelation newbies (see screenshot on the right). You can download the source code of this flare application here, the flare toolkit itsef and all information how to get it running can be found at flare.prefuse.org.

If you prefer working with java we highly recommend the java companion of flare, the prefuse visualization toolkit. Again, a very basic demo is waiting to be improved by you, you can download it from here. All necessary information about the prefuse toolkit are available at prefuse.org.

Happy always