Visualize Friend of a Friend (foaf) graph

Question

I wrote a script to export twitter friends as foaf rdf description. Now I'm looking for a tool to visualize the friend networks. I tried http://foafscape.berlios.de/ but for 300+ Nodes it is really slow and does a bad job on auto formatting.

Any hints for good graph visualization tools? It's ok if they do not support foaf directly, but they should be able to use images for graph nodes and be able to display large graphs. Linux support would be nice.

Oh, and I'm searching for an interactive tool where I can move nodes by hand.

Update: Thanks for your input. I know graphviz and for static images it is really great. But for large datasets I need to be able to select nodes and highlight all neighbours.

• Prefuse looks great: http://prefuse.org/gallery/graphview/
• trough prefuse I found vizster, which is exactly what I search (just need to find some sourcecode) http://jheer.org/vizster/

Answer 1

perhaps the prefuse visualization toolkit might help you. It's based on Java and has many sample apps including a graph viewer.

Answer 2

You could try Graphviz. It runs on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X and it will generate an image (PNG, PS, etc) of the graph. You will have to transform your foaf data into its own custom language, but it's pretty easy to learn.