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Attributes
- Type of analysis: Visualization Analysis Enrichment Programming
- Type of license: Open Source
- Web Usable: Software you Download and Install
- Ease of Use: Very Difficult
- Warning: Complex and Difficult No longer supported
- Tool Family: SEASR
- Historic Tool (developed before 2005): No longer in active development
- TaDiRAH Goals: Creation Enrichment Analysis
- TaDiRAH Methods: Editing Programming Visualization
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Overview and Setup
Meandre is a graphical programing language built on top of the Seasr infrastructure designed to facilitate the creations of processes that the creators describe as flows. A flow is a pipeline of modules that accepts some kind of data as input, processes this data through a series of defined steps, and produces some form of output. Running Meandre requires a webserver but is otherwise easy to setup. Simply run the supplied sh scripts to activate both the Seasr infrastructure and the Meandre workbench. The Modules need to be added manually. Directions to do so are available on the Meandre website.
Features
Each step in the process comes in the form of a Meandre module. Each module represents some transformation of the original data. For example, one flow might as follows: input data, remove all capital letters, remove words in a stoplist, input into a word cloud, display word cloud. In this case, an arbitrary text is used as input and the output is a word cloud. Meandre is packaged with a default set of modules for several popular and powerful text analysis tools such as zotero and mallet, but also more primitive tools such as a date filter and a module that changes named locations into longitude and latitude pairs.
Meandre works on top of the Seasr infrastructure. Each Meandre flow can be activated and is automatically uploaded to the Seasr server that it is running on. Once active, any user can access this flow by accessing the server it is running on allowing them to input their own data into the flow.
Conclusion
Meandre is best described as a platform for creating text analysis tools. Likewise, it is a visual programing language in the purest sense. Just like any other programing language there is a learning curve involved with using Meandre that some users might find challenging. However, Meandre offers its users the ability to create custom workflows and tie together other tools in a very systematic way.
The website is down, but an archived version of the site can be found here: https://web.archive.org/web/20170504160911/http://www.seasr.org/meandre/