SocNetV

SocNetV (Social Network Visualizer) is a free, open-source, cross-platform desktop application for social network analysis (SNA) and visualization, written in C++ with the Qt toolkit and released under the GPLv3. It is developed primarily by Dimitris Kalamaras and runs on Linux, Windows, and macOS. Aimed chiefly at social researchers, it lets users build networks by hand on a canvas or import existing data, then compute a wide range of graph-theoretic and SNA metrics and render the result with several layout algorithms.

Internally SocNetV treats a network as a mathematical graph (directed or undirected, weighted, and multi-relational) and its native, default file format is format:graphml, which it uses for full round-trip storage of nodes, edges, weights, and custom attributes. Beyond GraphML it imports and exports a spread of established graph and SNA formats: it exports to format:dot (GraphViz), format:pajek, format:dl (UCINET Data Language), adjacency-matrix sociomatrices, and simple or weighted edge lists (format:edge-list), and additionally imports format:gml and two-mode affiliation sociomatrices. Node and edge attribute tables can be exported to format:csv and JSON and re-imported to update attributes in bulk, and networks can be rendered out to PDF or Qt-supported raster images (PNG, JPG, BMP, TIFF).

Its analytical core is what distinguishes it from pure visualization tools: it computes density, diameter, geodesics, clustering coefficients, and a full battery of centrality and prestige indices (degree, closeness, betweenness, eigenvector, information centrality, PageRank), along with structural-equivalence and community-detection routines. It can also generate random networks (Erdos-Renyi, scale-free, small-world, ring lattice) and includes a built-in web crawler that maps hyperlink structure between pages into a network.

In the graph-data and format-conversion landscape, SocNetV overlaps with the classic SNA lineage of tool:ucinet, tool:netdraw, and tool:pajek, and its GraphML/DOT/GML interchange makes it a practical bridge to visualization tools such as tool:gephi, tool:cytoscape, and tool:graphviz. Its strengths are an approachable GUI, a broad built-in metric suite, and useful format coverage. Limitations are that it is a single-author desktop application rather than a scripting library (unlike tool:igraph or tool:networkx), GML is import-only, and it does not read the richer modern formats such as GEXF, so it is best suited to teaching and mid-sized research networks rather than large-scale or programmatic pipelines.