A p a c h e A g o r a ------------------------ by Stefano Mazzocchi What is this? ------------- Agora is a virtual community visualizer. The idea is to be able to visualize virtual communities in order to provide insights into their composition, properties and evolution in time. Why was it created? ------------------- Mainly because of personal curiosity: I wanted to see if a simple mathematical model of human behavior applied to virtual communities would yield results that matched the general perception that the community participants share in their minds. Since it gave impressive results with the communities I'm familiar with, I decided to make it available to others to understand if the results were due to my personal bias or reflected a wider audience. What comes in the box? ---------------------- Agora is composed of two parts: - the script that processes MBOX files - the application that allows you to select the mailboxes, generate the network and visualize it. The visualizer can be run as a standalone graphical application or as an applet in a browser. It's up to you to choose which one you like the most. NOTE: you'll need a Java 1.2+ compatible virtual machine for Agora, both if you run it as an applet, or as an application. If you don't have it installed or your browser doesn't support that, go to http://java.sun.com/ and download the Java Plugin. how do I try it? ---------------- Type java -jar agora.jar http://people.apache.org/~stefano/agora/data/archives.dat to visualize the Apache communities (that file is kept up to date with our mail archives) NOTE: you must have the 'java' interepreter (1.2 or above) available in your PATH for this to work. how do I process my own messages? --------------------------------- The script that comes with Agora is only able to read uncompressed MBOX files. Prepare a collection of the MBOX files that you want to visualize in a directory, then type: python process.py -m /path/to/mailboxes this script will crawl all the mailboxes contained in that path and generate the according preprocessed information in the local ./data folder. WARNING: the scripts will recursively process all mbox files even in subfolders. the same structure and folder names will be used in the visualizer. NOTE: you must have the 'python' (2.3 or above) interpreer available in your Path for this to work. When you are done, type java -jar agora.jar data/archives.dat to visualize your communities. - o - Thanks for your interest in Apache Agora.