SVGs

One of MicrobeTrace's easter eggs is the ability to import SVG files generated by MicrobeTrace or by Gephi. To demo this, consider the following image of a network:

If we wanted to recreate this network from this JPEG, we'd be in for a rough time. We'd have to figure out where all the nodes were, and where all the links were, and connect those two. Problematically, we can't really distinguish between links pointed directly at node centers, and links which roughly coincide with the node centers but actually pass behind the node without linking to it.

SVGs don't have that problem. Instead, they have a semantically-defined object for each link in the dataset, complete with coordinates. If we're using a MicrobeTrace SVG, those coordinates correspond precisely to coordinates of another semantically-defined object representing a node.