Using the Graph Commons data output

sumApp now works with both Kumu AND Graph Commons!

Graph Commons is an Open Source graph visualization platform that does most things differently from Kumu, and it does some things much better. So to give our sumApp users the best of both worlds, we now have two separate sets of data-output:

• One designed explicitly to work with Kumu.
• Another designed explicitly to work with Graph Commons.

Using your Graph Commons data in sumApp is pretty simple.

Just go to your project’s ‘Data Management’ area, select ‘GraphCom Download’ and select the dataset you want.

Graph Commons doesn’t allow for ‘live linking’ like Kumu does, so updating your data will have to be manual until that changes.

Once you’ve downloaded both the ‘Nodes’ file and the ‘Edges’ file, go to your Graph Commons project. Click the pencil icon

Then ‘IMPORT’

Then ‘EXCEL CSV’

Import your two files one at a time, taking care with node & connection ‘type’ spelling and capitalization.

Voila! Now you have a map!

Some caveats:

Graph Commons is different from Kumu.

We enable you to export all the project data, but don’t expect to be able to use it the same ways you can in Kumu.

For instance, at this point, we haven’t found a way to use time-tagging in Graph Commons, so you probably won’t want that data-set (especially since it dramatically alters the number of connections and will skew your maps drastically).

It’s your data & you might find a way to use it, so we make it available. But that doesn’t mean that each field will be useful in Graph Commons. If there are fields that you don’t want in your map, you can always delete those columns from the .csv file before you import it into Graph Commons

Related posts:

1. Understanding the URL field on the Bio page
2. Understanding your map embed options