Gossip

Addressed problem

In general, large software systems and various kinds of information related to them may be difficult to read or to understand in textual form. Source codes may be large and they can contain many interconnected entities. If one wants to understand this information, one has to imagine abstract entities, relations between them and processes. Visualization is often a good way to explore complicated data and to see it in a form more customized for specific scenario of exploration.

Description

We have developed our own graph visualization software called Gossip (Graph-Oriented SyStem for Information Presentation). Its purpose is not only to visualize our research results but also to act as a collaborative environment and therefore to assist in software development process.

Gossip acts as a web site that uses WebGL to display graphs in 3D. There are two types of graphs. Both display source code structure – files and folders – with additional information such as recent authors, smells and user tags.

The following two graphs present the same part of source code with user tags flying above files and folders.