Workflow

BasicSpanner exposes the full analysis pipeline through a single graphical interface organized in two sidebars and a central viewer.

Left sidebar

File Operations

Imports graphs and seeds, keeps a history of recently opened files and exports the final analysis (edges, node metrics, Gephi metadata). Self-loops and isolated nodes are detected on import and reported in the status bar.

Node Filters

A stackable list of filters that are applied sequentially to the input graph before any analysis. Available filters include:

• Degree range: removes units whose degree is outside a given interval (particularly useful to discard extremely high-degree hubs).
• Betweenness centrality: keeps only nodes within a given centrality range.
• Largest connected component: restricts the analysis to the largest connected component.
• Isolated-node removal: removes nodes with no edges.
• Name patterns: includes or excludes nodes whose identifier matches a regular expression.

Filters are reversible; deactivating one restores the removed nodes in subsequent analyses.

Central viewer

The Viewer displays the current network using the layout selected in the Visualization Controls panel (Automatic, Circular, Yifan Hu, Spring Force, Hierarchical, Grid or Random). Seeds are drawn in red, connectors in blue. Nodes can also be colored according to degree or different centrality measures (closeness, betweenness, clustering coefficient, PageRank).

Next to the viewer, the Node List tabulates every visible unit with its degree in the global network and in the basic network.

Bottom tabs

• Visualization Controls: layout algorithm, parameters, view mode (Basic network vs. full graph).
• Seed Selection: loading from file or random generation.
• Algorithm Configuration: number of replicates, replicate mode, threads, pruning.
• Execution: start, pause and cancel analyses.
• Results and Export: per-replicate table, summary statistics and export controls.

Real-time histogram

During execution a floating window displays a histogram of connector counts as each replicate finishes, along with summary statistics (mean, median, standard deviation, range) and the raw per-replicate values. The histogram and table can be exported independently from the rest of the outputs.

Typical pipeline

1. Import the network.
2. Apply filters.
3. Load or generate seeds.
4. Configure replicates, threads and pruning.
5. Run the analysis.
6. Inspect the basic network and the distribution of connector counts.
7. Export the edges, the node metrics and the Gephi metadata.