force layout in d3.js

A small but elegant project to visualize facebook topic data.

I "naively" define the influencer as those who have most connections, but it can have a better matrix to define topic's "influence".

What I have done:

• set up interactive force layout with fake data. The graph can be dragged, highlighted, filtered by users.
• update the layout's nodes\links to have real-time data update(from backend pipeline), which lies a hard point as to how to detach the data from the nodes\links, since d3's underlying mechanism won't update the data value automatically, we need to exit() then enter() again to update all nodes\links data value and indexs. Then call that update() function whenever I insert\remove nodes\links from graph.
• filter data by topics.
• show topic's hierarchy.
• dynamically generate each topic and its influencers, allow users to toggle any of them.

TODOs:

• apply association rule to find the similarity of difference topics(which and which are more coherent and thus can form a community).
• generalize the hottness of each topic(for advertising use).
• apply machine learning to help to predict the topics and potential community a phrase may belong to.

DEMO: