Network Workbench

Katy BörnerBruce Herr

Information Visualization Lab and Cyberinfrastructure for Network

Science CenterSLIS, Indiana University, IUB

Talk at NetSci 2006

Network Workbench

NWB is a cyberinfrastructure for network scientists that promotes, tracks, enables, and teaches about network science.

Network Workbench

Vital Information:•Funded by a 3-year $1.1 million

NSF grant •Established to create a

cyberinfrastructure for network scientists

•PIs are Katy Börner, Albert-László Barabási, Santiago Schnell, Alessandro Vespignani, Stanley Wasserman, and Eric Wernert

•Targeting network science researchers, practitioners, and students

Supported in part by the NSF IIS-0513650 award.

Network Workbench

Software Team:• Team Lead: Weixia (Bonnie) Huang• Developer: Ben Markines• Developer: Bruce Herr• Algorithm Developer: Santo

Fortunato• Algorithm Developer: Cesar Hidalgo

Network Workbench

Parts of the Network Workbench cyberinfrastructure

Data• Access to diverse datasetsSoftware• NWB Research Tool – A flexible large-scale

analysis, modeling, and visualization toolkit• SciMaps – Knowledge domain visualizations• Bioinformatics education & research portalResources• Learning environment for new and future

network science studentsPapers• Index of current papers in network scienceMore to come…

Network Workbench

NWB Research Tool:• Built with the CIShell – a Plug-in based Software Framework

• Eclipse RCP-based framework• An empty shell for integration of diverse plug-ins

• NWB core will be tested for biomedical, scientometrics, and physics research• Will be runnable over the web, on the desktop, and on the desktop with a back-end server

CIShell Architecture

Network Workbench

Demo NWB Research Tool

Network Workbench

Summer Improvements and Future:• Move plugin architecture to OSGi-based service architecture.• OSGi (Open Services Gateway Initiative) is an industry standard for 7 years now with an active standards board.

• Alliance members include IBM (Eclipse), Sun, Intel, Oracle, Motorola, NEC and many others.

• An algorithm/plug-in will then be a service that can be used in any OSGi-framework based system.• Connecting running frameworks over RPC/RMI will be greatly simplified, enabling peer-to-peer sharing of data, algorithms, and computing power.• CIShell could become a standard for creating OSGi Services for algorithms and will provide a reference GUI that uses the underlying services.

Network Workbench

Check these sites out:• Network Workbench Portal: http://nwb.slis.indiana.edu• SciMaps.org: http://www.SciMaps.org• InfoVis Cyberinfrastructure: http://iv.slis.indiana.edu• CIShell Framework: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cishell