This Week in Neo4j – Graph Visualization, GraphQL, Spatial, Scheduling, Python
Head of Product Innovation & Developer Strategy, Neo4j
4 min read
Welcome to this week in Neo4j where we round up what’s been happening in the world of graph databases in the last 7 days.
As my colleague Mark Needham is on his well earned vacation, I’m filling in this week.
Next week we plan to do something different. Stay tuned!
Featured Community Member: Jeffrey Miller
opens in new tabJeffrey A. Miller works as a Senior Consultant in Columbus, Ohio supporting clients in a wide variety of topics.
Jeffrey has delivered presentations (opens in new tabslides) at regional technical conferences and opens in new tabuser groups on topics including Neo4j graph technology, knowledge management, and humanitarian healthcare projects.
Jeffrey A. Miller – This Week’s Featured Community Member
Jeffrey published a really interesting opens in new tabGraph Gist on the Software Development Process Model.
He was recently interviewed at the opens in new tabCross Cutting Concerns Podcast on his work with Neo4j.
Jeffrey and his wife, Brandy, are aspiring adoptive parents and have written a fun children’s book called opens in new tab“Skeeters” with proceeds supporting adoption.
On behalf of the Neo4j community, thanks for all your work Jeffrey!
Interesting, Neo4j Related Projects
- The infamous Max De Marzi demonstrates how to use Neo4j for a common opens in new tabmeeting room scheduling task. Quite impressive Cypher queries in there.
- Max also demos another new feature of Neo4j 3.4 – geo-spatial indexes. In his opens in new tabblog post, he describes how to use them to find the right type of food place for your tastes via the geolocation of the city that you’re both in.
- There seems to be a lot of recent interest in Python front-ends for Neo4j, Timothée Mazzucotelli created NeoPy which is early alpha but contains some nice ideas
- Zeqi Lin has a opens in new tabnumber of cool repositories of importing different types of data into Neo4j, e.g. Java classes, Git Commits or parts of Docx documents, and even SnowGraph a software data analytics platform built on Neo4j.
- I think I came across this before, but the opens in new tabnewrelic-neo4j is really a neat way of getting Neo4j metrics into NewRelic, thanks opens in new tabȘtefan-Gabriel Muscalu. While browsing his repositories I also came across this opens in new tabWikiData Neo4j Importer which I need to test out
- This opens in new tabAutoComplete system uses Neo4j which stores terms, counts and other associated information. It returns top 10 suggestions for auto-complete and tracks usage patterns.
- Sam answered a question on counting distinct paths on opens in new tabStackOverflow
A new version of py2neo is coming soon. Designed for Neo4j 3.x, this will remove the previously mandatory HTTP dependency and include a new set of command line tools and other goodies. Expect an alpha release within the next few days.
Graph Visualizations
I had some fun this week with opens in new tab3d-force-graph and neo4j. It was really easy to combine the 3d graph visualization project based on three.js and available in 2D, 3D, for VR and as React Components with the Neo4j javascript driver. The graphs up to 5000 relationships load sub-second.
See the results of my experiments in opens in new tabmy repository which also links to several opens in new tablive versions of different setups (thanks to rawgit)
My colleague Will got an access key to opens in new tabGraphistry and used this opens in new tabJupyter Notebook to load the Russian Twitter trolls from Neo4j.
I also came across another opens in new tabCytoscape plugin for Neo4j, which looks quite useful.
opens in new tabZhihong SHEN created a opens in new tabData Visualizer for larger Neo4j graphs using vis.js, you can see an opens in new tabonline demo here
Desktop & GraphQL
This weeks update of Neo4j Desktop has seen the addition of the neo4j-graphql extension that our team has been working on for a while.
There will be more detail around it from Will next week but I wanted to share a sneak preview for all of you that want to have some fun with opens in new tabGraphQL & Neo4j over the weekend.
Next Week
What’s happening next two weeks in the world of graph databases?
| Date | Title | Group | Speaker |
|---|---|---|---|
|
April 3rd |
GraphDB Lyon |
Gabriel Pillet |
|
|
April 5th |
GraphDB Brussels |
Tom Michiels, Dirk Vermeylen, Ignaz Wanders, Surya Gupta |
|
|
April 9-10th |
GoDataDriven |
Ron van Weverwijk |
|
|
April 10th |
opens in new tabTraining – Atelier – Les basiques Neo4j – Paris |
Paris |
Benoit Simard |
|
April 10th |
opens in new tabMeetup – The Night Before the Graphs – Milan |
Milan |
Michele Launi, Matteo Cimini, Roberto Franchini, Omar Rampado, Alberto De Lazzari |
|
April 11th |
Milan |
several |
|
|
April 12th |
Milan |
Lorenzo Speranzoni, Fabio Lamanna |
|
|
April 12th |
Arlington, VA |
several |
|
|
April 12th |
Munich |
Stefan Armbruster |
|
|
April 13th |
Amsterdam |
Kees Vegter |
|
|
April 29th |
PyData London |
Adam Hill |
Tweet of the Week
My favourite tweet this week was our own Easter Bunny
#HappyEaster #Neo4j Community
CREATE
(h:Head)<-[:EAR]-(h),
(h)-[:EAR]->(h),
(b:Body)-[:NECK]->(h),
(b)-[:WAG]->(t:Tail),
(fl:Leg)<-[:JNT]-(b)-[:JNT]->(fr:Leg),
(hl:Leg)<-[:JNT]-(b)-[:JNT]->(hr:Leg)
RETURN * pic.twitter.com/eItnZCzFBj— Neo4j (@neo4j) March 30, 2018
Don’t forget to RT if you liked it too.
That’s all for this week. Have a great weekend!
And Happy Easter or Passover, if you celebrate it.
Cheers, Michael
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