Advanced data usage

Cosmograph uses a dual system of IDs and indices to deliver high performance. IDs provide human-readable references to your data points, while indices power the core engine for high performance. This approach significantly reduces memory overhead, provides efficient data lookups and improves rendering speed, especially when working with large networks.

To unlock Cosmograph’s full performance potential, your data should include indexed points and their corresponding source/target indexes in the link data.

If you’re struggling with data indexing, feel free to skip this section and follow the Cosmograph Data Kit guide, which describes how to use a tool that will handle all data indexing and preparation tasks for your data. Note that Data Kit requires processing time.

Once your data is indexed, it will load into Cosmograph almost instantly — giving you the fastest possible visualization performance.

Points configuration

Cosmograph needs at least points to render. The minimal required configuration options for points data to render it is:

• points: The points data.
• pointIdBy: Unique identifier column for each point.
• pointIndexBy: Ordinal index column of each point from 0 to x (unique points count). This index is used for efficient lookup and referencing.

You can find full list of points properties here.

Links configuration

The minimal required configuration options for links data is:

• links: The links data.
• linkSourceBy: Unique identifier column that contains pointIdBy of the source point of the link.
• linkSourceIndexBy: The index column of the source point of the link. This corresponds to the pointIndexBy of the point identified by linkSourceBy.
• linkTargetBy: Unique identifier column that contains pointIdBy of the target point of the link.
• linkTargetIndexBy: The index column of the target point of the link. This corresponds to the pointIndexBy of the point identified by linkTargetBy.

You can find full list of link properties here.

It’s important to note that if the required indices (pointIndexBy for points, and linkSourceIndexBy with linkTargetIndexBy for links) are not provided, Cosmograph won’t be able to render your data.