SAGE - The Smarter Academic Graph Explorer

Project Timeline

March 16, 2012

Completed Design Document and Webpage.
Received Microsoft Academic Search App ID

March 17, 2012

Set up code repository on Bitbucket

March 23, 2012

All team members have Google Appengine server installed and set up.
Registered the Google appid sage-search

March 25, 2012

Backend: The server can construct queries to the Microsoft API and parse the response.
Frontend: Working experimental dynamic graph explorer - clicking on a node centers it, exposes certain nodes, and hides other nodes.

March 27, 2012

Backend: Major refactoring of backend code to modularize query responders and data handling. Implemented test graph query responder.
Frontend: Basic CSS template and navbar in all pages

March 28, 2012

Backend: The server can respond to client requests by constructing the appropriate queries, and then returning them in JSON.
Frontend: Major refactoring of client code (it was previously experimental) to separate the graph Renderer, the query code, and the dynamic navigation functionality.
Hooked up all of the client modules to get data from the server and operate on it.

March 30, 2012

Client-server communication working with Microsoft queries. Client can receive and render the basic graph data, as well as navigate the academic graph.

April 11, 2012

Experimented with an alternate layout manager based on a radial layout, to deal with shortcomings of arborjs.

April 12, 2012

Implemented basic sidebar functionality.
Implemented basic mouseover functionality

April 13, 2012

Backend: Implemented logging of requests and timing statistics
Frontend: Ported frontend to use new radial layout based on divs instead of canvas.

April 15, 2012

Parallelized neighbor queries by asynchronously performing queries from microsoft. Server time speedup of almost 10x.

April 18, 2012

Frontend: Added triangular directed edges to radial layout.
Backend: Bug with async queries meant that the speedup was not as dramatic as first thought. The bottleneck is round trip time from our server to microsoft, where each query is about 2.8 seconds.

April 20, 2012

Eliminate neighbor queries for which we already have the data. Makes revisiting nodes much faster

April 21, 2012

Added empty files for about, contact, and help

April 24, 2012

Cosmetic changes - color changes and logo. Minor frontend bug fixes with odd mouseover timing

April 25, 2012

Implemented tabs using jqueryUI tabs

April 26, 2012

Code cleanup and encryption of appid in preparation for pushing live onto appengine. First version of SAGE pushed onto google appengine.

April 28, 2012

Cosmetic changes (colors, shapes, and sizes) in preparation for demo hour. Demonstrated SAGE at Demo Hour for prefrosh.

April 29, 2012

Finished About, Contact, and Help pages. Worked on fitting text into the alloted space for e.g. long author names or titles.

May 3, 2012

Added favicon. Finished implementing tab functionality (closeable, draggable, mouse events for displaying/undisplaying).

May 8, 2012

To protect against confusing behavior on multiple clicks, only load the result of the most recent neighbor click. Color scheme overhaul.

May 9, 2012

Instead of displaying text over the nodes, have a separate "tag" containing author and year. Fix inconsistencies in node transition animation and hovertext placement. Cosmetic changes and bug fixes

May 10, 2012

Animate node tag transitions. Delete unused edges to prevent cluttering up the DOM. Cosmetic changes and bug fixes.

May 14, 2012

Final bug fixes: Unicode support, animation inconsistencies, and timeout handling