visual analytics for big data transaction flow
Influent is a web-based application for visually and interactively following transaction flow, revealing actors and behaviors of potential concern that might otherwise go unnoticed. Summary visualization of transactional patterns and actor characteristics, interactive link expansion and dynamic entity clustering enable Influent to operate effectively at scale with big data sources, in any modern web browser. Influent has been used to explore data sets with millions of entities and hundreds of millions of transactions.
Service Provider Interfaces (SPIs) provide a plugin style framework for developers to provide runtime-injected modules for search, data access, clustering and other services. Avro is used to define the SPI protocols in cross-language form in influent-spi. In process Java service implementations are injected via Guice, which may optionally delegate to out of process providers using web services standards such as REST, for which Avro provides convenient serialization.
- Java: Version 17 (OpenJDK or Oracle JDK)
- Maven: Version 3.8.8 or later
- Memory: At least 2GB RAM for building (4GB recommended)
To build the core Influent modules:
# Build core modules (stable)
mvn -B -ntp clean compile -pl aperture-spi,aperture-common,aperture-client
# Run tests
mvn -B -ntp test -pl aperture-spi,aperture-common,aperture-clientThe project uses:
- Maven Enforcer Plugin to verify Java 17 and Maven 3.8.8+ requirements
- Pinned plugin versions for reproducible builds
- Centralized dependency management via parent POM
- Java 17 release flag for forward compatibility
Some modules are currently disabled due to dependency or API compatibility issues:
aperture-server-core,aperture-server(servlet API conflicts)aperture-capture-phantom(Guava API compatibility with Java 17)aperture-layout-yworks(missing commercial yWorks dependency)aperture-graph(unavailable javaml dependency)influent-spi(Avro IDL parsing issues)
Memory Issues: Increase Maven memory with MAVEN_OPTS="-Xmx2048m -Xms1024m"
Plugin Warnings: Some modules may show warnings about unknown plugin parameters - these are non-critical
Dependency Resolution: If builds fail, try mvn clean to clear cached artifacts
Documentation on installing, configuring and using Influent is available in the docs folder in the source code.
- Explore live demos at the Influent web page.
- Review and install the necessary prerequisites before installing Influent on your machine.
- Learn how to build Influent from the source code.
Comprehensive cognitive architecture documentation with interactive Mermaid diagrams is available in the architecture documentation folder:
- Architecture Overview - Complete system cognitive architecture with neural-symbolic integration patterns
- Service Provider Interface - Hypergraph pattern encoding for extensible cognitive modules
- Tile Visualization System - Emergent multi-scale pattern navigation architecture
- Client-Side Architecture - Interactive neural-symbolic interface patterns
- Enhancement Framework - Recursive documentation improvement pathways
The architecture documentation captures emergent cognitive patterns and recursive implementation pathways through adaptive, hypergraph-centric visualizations that facilitate distributed cognition for all contributors.
- Review the Release Notes to see what's new.
- Read about the complete installation and configuration procedures for custom Influent deployments.
- Examine the configuration of the example applications provided with the source code:
- Learn how to deploy your Influent application to a web server.
- Browse the User Guide to understand how to navigate the user interface and investigate your data.
For support questions, technical suggestions and contributions, please post your feedback to the GitHub Issues forum for this project.
Influent is under ongoing development and is freely available for download under the Apache License, Version 2.0 open source licensing.