At Graph Commons, we’ve been working hard to provide a great experience for network mapping and exploration. Over time, we’ve seen many different needs for the mapping interface that our members want to have and how they want to manage their workflows.

Today, we are excited to announce the new Hub Explore feature on Graph Commons. A hub on Graph Commons is a networked knowledge base, or a data network, that is a giant graph containing many interconnected graphs with unified node and edge data types. Hub data is generated and used by organizational accounts on Graph Commons.

The Hub Explore feature provides three useful ways of making and exploring graphs.

  1. When you go to a hub’s explore page you’re on an empty graph canvas. You click on the canvas, search an existing node, and simply add it to the graph. The added node has all the properties from descriptions to images to links with it. So, you don’t create a node from scratch, but use existing data from the hub data.
    explore-a-hub

  2. You’ll see a plus sign (+) on the node you’ve just added, which indicates the node has existing connections, it is expandable. You click on the plus sign or double click on the node, and simply select the relations to expand into the graph. All the end nodes come with their properties and existing connections. So you can keep expanding nodes until you have what you need.
    exapnd-node

  3. We all want to find out how two things are connected. On a hub’s Explore interface, you click on the “Paths” button, enter two existing nodes, and see all the shortest paths between two given nodes added to the graph canvas.
    Exploring paths

Whether you’re a journalist investigating a topic, a researcher navigating an archive, or a data scientist debugging a data corpus, we think the Hub Explore feature will help you to quickly find out connections between things and help you build an insight about the knowledge space you’re probing.

Try the new explore feature from the selected hubs below:

hub-simpol
SIMPOL – Financial Systems SIMulation and POLicy Modelling in European Union

Explore SIMPOL

hub-ffai
Foundation for Art Initiatives – FfAI has been making grants in the arts since 1999

Explore FfAI

hub-mulksuzlestirme
Networks of Dispossession – Mapping the relations of capital and power in Turkey

Explore Networks of Dispossession

We hope you enjoy the new Explore Hub feature. We welcome feedback on your experience. Let us know if you have any questions or comments at contact@graphcommons.com, we’d love to hear from you.

Photo by Paulo Simões Mendes