Learn, Compare, Collect the Facts!

If we are going to apply Ivan Pavlov's above maxim while using BioFabric, we need to be able to compare network subgraphs. So I'm going to take another quick detour and provide a brief HOWTO on BioFabric's Compare Multiple Nodes feature that I have been making use of to prepare my next World Bank network post.

A few weeks back, I introduced how to create a submodel, so you can focus in on interesting pieces of your network. But the step-by-step process I previously described can be time-consuming and error-prone if you have a lot of nodes you need to select. So I added the Compare Multiple Nodes feature to BioFabric to make this common task easier.

Continuing to work with the World Bank Major Contract Award network, say I wish to create a submodel that contains the contracts associated with fourteen selected countries. The easiest way to do this is to first create a plain text file (using e.g. Notepad or TextEdit) that is simply a list of the countries we want to compare:

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Having started BioFabric and loaded the full network file, you just choose Tools->Compare Multiple Nodes... from the main menu:

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Which brings up a dialog that allows you to enter a list of nodes you wish to compare:

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If you just have a few, you can just use the Add New Entry... button to create a few empty rows in the table, and type the names in. But since we have already created a list in a text file, just click on the Load Names From File button and choose that file from the file chooser dialog that pops up. The dialog table will then be stocked from the file entries:

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Clicking OK then handles all the steps for creating the submodel: selecting the nodes, selecting the first neighbors and associated links, and launching the submodel view:

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In my next post, I will show an interesting feature of the network that we can see by comparing a couple of subgraphs that were built using this feature.