Network Workbench

1
Network Workbench
Katy Börner Bruce Herr Information Visualization
Lab and Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science
Center SLIS, Indiana University, IUB Talk at
NetSci 2006
2
Network Workbench
NWB is a cyberinfrastructure for network
scientists that promotes, tracks, enables, and
teaches about network science.
3
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.
4
Network Workbench

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

5
Network Workbench

• Parts of the Network Workbench cyberinfrastructure
  
• Data
• Access to diverse datasets
• Software
• NWB Research Tool A flexible large-scale
  analysis,
• modeling, and visualization toolkit
• SciMaps Knowledge domain visualizations
• Bioinformatics education research portal
• Resources
• Learning environment for new and future network
  science students
• Papers
• Index of current papers in network science
• More to come

6
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

7
CIShell Architecture
8
Network Workbench
Demo NWB Research Tool
9
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.

10
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.india
  na.edu
• CIShell Framework http//sourceforge.net/project
  s/cishell