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Comment by babyshake | Hacker News Reader

Are there any common reasons why a startup would be interested in graph visualization? There's clearly uses here for visualizing a social network or RDF graph, but what else?

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Network topology. Code visualization. State machines. Mind-mapping. Transportation networks. It depends on what kind of data you need to visualize.

I can't give too many details away.. but where I work we've been using graph visualizations and algorithms to investigate and detect fraud.

I've open sourced the force directed graph viz part of it in case anyone is interested: http://github.com/dhotson/springy

A novel answer to that question could be the basis for a startup, in an of its own right, I should think!

How about everything?

Seriously. The graph is one of the best data structures we have for modeling systems and taxonomies.

See, for example, Avatar. What enabled the effects in that film, at its very core?

A Directed Acyclic Graph.

[the brain](http://www.thebrain.com/) rocked 10 years ago, and reimplementing it in a smooth html5 finish would be a serious competitor to the established wiki's.

PersonalBrain does feel a bit clunky in Java and it stinks that it's a desktop-only application (with a not-so-great and expensive Java web version). That having been said, it still rocks. I use it every day.

I would love to see competition for it as a collaborative webapp or as a native OS X / iPhone / iPad app.

Documenting IT servers, services, networks... application dependency mapping. If you can query the graph, you can analyze the impact of changes before you make them. That's exactly what our product does see video: http://pathwaysystems.com/?autoplay=impact

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