Building, Importing, and Exporting GEXF Graph Files with rgexf

Abstract

First introduced in 2012, the rgexf package for the R programming language was the first effort to make the Graph Exchange XML Format (GEXF) (Heymann et al., 2009) specification available to the R world. With more than 500,000 downloads1, it is one of the most popular ways to incorporate GEXF files into the R programming language environment. Developed by the Gephi Core Group (Bastian et al., 2009), the GEXF specification is a flexible and widely used format to describe graphs. Although it has not been updated since 2009, the GEXF format has been introduced to several tools and programming environments.