SoNIA – Social Network Image Animator
http://www.stanford.edu/group/sonia/index.html

SoNIA is a Java-based package for visualizing dynamic or longitudinal “network” data. By dynamic, they mean that in addition to information about the relations (ties) between various entities (actors, nodes) there is also information about when these relations occur, or at least the relative order in which they occur. Their intention for SoNIA is to read-in dynamic network information from various formats, aid the user in constructing “meaningful” layouts, and export the resulting images or “movies” of the network, along with information about the techniques and parameter settings used to construct the layouts, and some form of statistic indicating the “accuracy” or degree of distortion present in the layout. This is all somewhat ambitious, but not impossible. In addition, they hope that SoNIA will have other uses. One of the most important is for it to work as a platform for the development, testing, and comparison of various static and dynamic layout techniques. Because of this, they have attempted to code SoNIA as an OpenSource project in a modular fashion so that the various layout techniques and tools are fairly interchangeable, and they can all draw on a common set of utility functions for common network and layout operations. Another mode of use that SoNIA supports is that of a “browser” for time-based network data. ztheir intention is to make it as easy as possible for users (us) to visually inspect sets of relations in large datasets at varying temporal resolutions and degrees of aggregation. This has been added to Social Informatics Subject Tracer™ Information Blog.