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Building a Network

Create a new Workspace

First, you need to create a new workspace to store your networks. Click on the Create New Workspace button in the Workspaces Window.

Choose a name and any description text (optional), and click on Add Workspace.

Upload a File

Now we need to fill this empty workspace with a test network. BeGraph uses csv files to load the data and create the corresponding datasource in the cloud. The csv file should be UTF-8 encoded to properly recognize non-alphanumeric characters. Start downloading a social network dataset from a public repository. We have chosen a social network with around four thousand nodes and ninety thousand links. Extract the file and change its extension to csv in your local computer so BeGraph can load it. We name it network_links.csv.

Go to the file uploader and configure it according to the format of the file. In this case, choose the file, set the value delimiter to a white space, unset the HasHeader field and upload it.

Then, a new file should appear in the list with the uploading date.

Datasource creation

Now we have a file, you can create a Datasource with the link structure of the network. Datasources are associated with workspaces, and can be created/viewed clicking on the following button, once the workspace is loaded.

Click on Create New Datasource, select your recently uploaded csv file


and a new datasource will appear. You can preview it to check the information contained in each column.

Network Build

The last step is to create an empty network (undirected and without parallel links) and fill it with the Datasource information. Click on the create new network button,

Then choose the name and whether the network is directed and/or has parallel links. This social network is undirected and does not have parallel links:


Then the network exists (you can edit the information or delete it), although there are no nodes or links:

Click on the network, and since it is empty, BeGraph will tell you to GO TO BUILD YOUR NETWORK.

We will fill the network from our datasource. Because it contains the links, the node names are implicit. Choose columns 0 and 1 as the link ends, set Create New Nodes ON and click on Build Network.

Once the network is built, you should check that it contains 4039 nodes and 88234 links. At this point, node and link properties could be loaded from additional datasources, but since the social network we use is anonymous, there are no properties available in the input file. The next step in this tutorial will be creating a spatial layout for the network.

tutorials/firstnetwork_01.txt · Last modified: 2019/03/27 16:06 by systems