About
General
This tool was created by Séverine Scheidt (scems@users.sourceforge.net) and Sylvie Neu (cilwi@users.sourceforge.net) @ the University of Applied Science, Kaiserslautern. It is an open source web application which was an assignment of the subject "Media Management and Production" conducted by Prof. Hendrik Speck.
BigBiz and its goal
BigBiz is about the German Business, more precise about German Corporations, Members of the German Bundestag and Lobbygroups. The focus lays on the analysis of social networks and to make the relationships between these groups and people visible to all people interested in German politics and economics. This is done by visualizing the connections on the one hand and on the other hand to provide information about the people, companies, lobbygroups etc.
Data providers
The data visualized about the German Corporations in this application is provided by Hoppenstedt (Darmstadt, Germany) "is part of the Swedish Bisnode group,
which is one of the largest business data provider in Europe." (Hoppenstedt, June 2008)
The other data source was the German Bundestag with its Members of the German Bundestag and its Lobbygroups. (June, 2008)
Realisation
As this is an open source project under the GNU General Public License (GPL), other open source products were used for its realisation.
In general, this application is created with PHP in combination with Javascript/Ajax.
For the visualization the Javascript Information visualization Toolkit (JIT) (version 1.0.2a, June 2008) is utilized.
Furthermore, the symfony framework (version 1.0.16, June 2008) forms the basis of the application which supports by default ajax frameworks like Prototype (version 1.5.0, June 2008) and Script.aculo.us (version 1.7.0, June 2008).
The database used is of course a mySQL DB (version 5.0.30, June 2008).
Further
For an introduction to the utilization of this application, please have a look at our help page.
