Graph analytics

Our long-term aim is to have fully-fledged link analysis in the browser. The first steps towards this have been released today.

The chart has a new graph function:

• Find all the connected components in the chart
• Calculate the distance of all nodes away from a given node
• Find all the items on shortest paths between any two nodes on the chart
• Navigate the neighbourhood (one hop) of a set of items via the neighbours function
• Degree centrality of all the nodes (and in/out degree) can be found using the degrees function.

Some of these calls can use custom data values on links. This means developers have a high degree of control over what the distances/values actually represent.

Layout packing

Disconnected components present a challenge when doing graph layouts. We now have a packing algorithm which packs disconnected nodes and sub-graphs to fill the space available.

KeyLines developers don't need to change their code - the new packing style is enabled by default.