Gephi Lite

a lighter, web based version of Gephi

 Paul Girard, Alexis Jacomy, Benoît Simard, Mathieu Jacomy

DH2025, July 14-18 2025, Lisbon, Portugal

Gephi

is an open-source network analysis and visualization software, written in Java

v0.6

v0.8

v0.9

v0.10

v0.7

"The Gephi paper" ICWSM 2009

"The ForceAtlas2 paper"

Is Gephi Obsolete? (spoiler: nope)

ICWSM Test of Time award

Introducing yearly Gephi Weeks

Gephi has a rich history

commits histogram from GitHub

and a strong active community

photos taken from the Gephi blog

🖌️🔨🔭

what do people use Gephi for?

analyze networks

Martin Grandjean, Mathieu Jacomy. Translating Networks: Assessing Correspondence Between Network Visualisation and Analytics.

Digital Humanities, 2019, Utrecht, Netherlands. halshs-02179024

create and edit static images

Martin Grandjean. Connected World: Untangling the Air Traffic Network

produce zoomable images

Nicolas Bouchaïb. Cartographie Twitch FR complète

export interactive views

OuestWare, Retina demo graph

🌐

what if Gephi was a web application?

"open in Gephi" permalinks

aka Gephi graphs as hypertext documents

Metaphors We Web By

embedding Gephi graphs in web pages with iframes

as simply as we embed geo maps in web pages

easy touch device support (tablets, mobiles)

the "Minority Report reference", yipp.nl

🎉

good news everyone

Gephi Lite

is an open-source network analysis and visualization web application

v0.1

Gephi JS: Exploring the dystopian future of a JavaScript Gephi

Gephi Lite shorter (but active!) history

commits histogram from GitHub

...

v0.2

v0.3

v0.4

v0.6

v0.5

FOSDEM 2019

Gephi Lite announced after Gephi Week 2022 in Paris

Bridging Research and Open Source: the genesis of Gephi Lite

FOSDEM 2024

User interviews

Full redesign

New version coming soon!

it serves the same purpose

(visual network analysis, basically)

it's from the same community
(just not the same exact people)

Gephi Lite "is Gephi" because

its interface keeps the same blocks

it only supports lighter graphs 🥲

it does not need to be installed (it's just a webpage)

its user interface is lighter

(complex features are simplified or removed)

Gephi Lite is lite because

it is a single page web app, with no server app or database

everything is done by the user's web browser

users can use    GitHub Gists as a "free cloud" to ease storing and sharing graphs

Gephi Lite handles various things dynamically⚙️

while

Gephi does them statically🖊️

Filters

Appearance

Caption

it is embeddable using iframes 🖼️

it comes with a JavaScript driver to start and drive Gephi Lite from other web applications

import { GephiLiteDriver } from "@gephi/gephi-lite-broadcast";
import Graph from "graphology";

async function openGraphInGephiLite(graph: Graph) {
  const driver = new GephiLiteDriver();

  await new Promise<void>((resolve) => {
    // Wait for new instance to be fully working:
    driver.on("newInstance", () => {
      resolve();
    });
    driver.openGephiLite();
  });

  await driver.importGraph(graph.toJSON());

  driver.destroy();
}

and it hides some more tricks🃏 up its sleeves

one graph per tab

integrated JavaScript data and filters scripting

node images

connected closeness display

who is Gephi Lite for?

😊

🧑‍🏫 Teachers

🧑‍🎓 Students

and anyone who can benefit from a more portable version of Gephi

who need to integrate Gephi as part of their applications

🧑‍💻 Web developers

who is Gephi Lite not for?

🫤

who know Gephi very well and use it at full capacity

🧑‍🔬 Gephi experts

or anyone with large graphs

(>10k nodes / >20k edges)

🧑‍🚀🚀 Rocket scientists

🤞demo time!

thanks for your attention

👋

Gephi Lite

By Alexis Jacomy

Gephi Lite

A 10 minutes presentation about Gephi Lite, at DH2025, Lisbon

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