[liberationtech] You can help connect the cablegate dots

[Uncle Zzzen]

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Greetings, coders and jurnos.
I need some help and/or advice.

I have a proof-or-concept demo at http://bl.ocks.org/4589092 of
semi-manual layout of cablegate reference graphs generated with
http://wlwardiary.github.com/cable2graph/ using the http://d3js.org
visualization library.
There are screenshots at https://pic.twitter.com/0uiXBUxq and
https://pic.twitter.com/AwA7MZJF but the demo only shows the cluster
you see in the first screenshot. If you download the code from
https://gist.github.com/4589092 you also have the other graph's json
file, as well as a third one.

What next?

All this is nice as a proof-of-concept, but I hope to be able to turn
this into a web service that lets generate such graphs on the fly (for
example as a result of a text search in the cable db).

So far, the main problem with providing cable2graph as a web service was layout:
1) It is costly for the server to do it.
   Better if the user sees the algorithm at work for a few seconds as
a psy-screensaver-like animation on the browser :)
2) Layout is still something people do better than machines.
   See for example https://pic.twitter.com/0uiXBUxq (d3) vs
https://dubiousdod.org/fil-mish-mish (cable2graph "classique")

Now that it works, I think I can write such a server, but I could use
some help/advice from you:

Journos
I'd like to hear some feedback whether such a tool could be helpful
for you. Please take a look at the demo and get a feel of it. Assume
that you'll be able to build graphs containing cables you're
interested in and search for those cables via an interface similar to
http://cablesearch.org/
Do you think such a tool could be useful for you? What would like to
see added or changed?

D3 wizards and javascriptas
This is what I've managed to achieve as a d3 noob, so I'm sure you
could do a much better visualization. We'll also need additional gui
(timeline, server interaction, etc.) that can be done in "traditional"
js/jquery, but it would be more consistent, aesthetic and easier to
maintain if we do the whole gui in d3.

Graph/network analysts
The cable2graph project itself probably has hidden potential I'm not
aware of. At the moment, I only plan to supply a front-end for the nbh
(neighbourhood graph) utility, but maybe you can come up with other
graphs and graph/node/link properties we could generate from this
material (igraph seems like a fun python library).

Server side should probably be in python (because cable2graph is) and
can/should be minimal for easier deployment (e.g. bottle or flask),
but I believe I'll use web.py as a tribute to its author :)

Comments are, of course, welcome.

Thanks,
The Dod
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