Data Preparation - shellywhen/measure-flow GitHub Wiki
Following Vistorian, the MeasureFlow imports data formatted in tables in csv format (comma-separated values) files. Each csv contains one table. You can export a csv file from
- MS Excel (File → Save As → Select file type 'CSV')
- Apple's Numbers (File → Export to → CSV)
- Google Sheet (File → Download as → Comma-separated values)
- text editor, you may utilize the online tool CSVLint to check if your
csvfile is properly formatted
This page explains what information you can put in your CSV files so that MeasureFlow can help you explore it with visualizations. There are some rules to follow where information goes.
Terminology
This document and the Manual follow the general network terminology. Though there are many concepts, potentially they mean the same. A network (or graph) is a set of nodes (/actors/vertices, etc.) and links (/relations/edges/arcs, etc.) Attributes are values associated to nodes and links. Our network model currently supports the following information:
- multiple links between the same pair of nodes
- time, i.e. changing network topology, attributes
Data Tables
The MeasureFlow takes in two types of tables depending on your network.
Link Table
A link table contains one row per link in the network while columns specify link attributes.
| Source | Target | Time | Attr_0 | ... |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Note that the source, target, and the time field are required. The source and target refer to the node ids of the link, which are strings, preferably integers. The time column should follow the same format as moment.js. Such format should be specified in the data upload page.
The attribute column is not required, however, you may include additional information such as
- link weight
- link type
- link id
Node Table
| Id | Attr_0 | ... |
|---|---|---|
Similarly, the attribute column is not required, yet you may want to assign
- node type
- alias