Hi all, Michael and I have been on a great BeNeLux tour starting with a Meetup in Delft and another one in Antwerp with the big finale in Brussels for FOSDEM, one of the worlds geekiest unconferences.
We talked at the GraphDevroom. Here are some observations:
We really enjoyed the interactions with the Neo4j community members at the meetups, with really interesting topics ranging from our plans for 2013 – ease of use and bigger data via Neo4j import via hadoop, a large visualisation roundup, use-cases like impact analysis in SOA architectures and Neo4j spatial.
Thanks a lot to Rik van Bruggen for organizing everything and making it a pleasant stay, and of course for taking care of the beer graph.
FOSDEM is a truly fantastic conference. Geeks only, no fluff anywhere, with an atmosphere like a morning standup with 5000 developer friends, even during your talk. Out of around 10 talks, 5 were directly about the usage of Neo4j, while the others referred to Neo4j which felt really good for us. The GraphDevRoom was full the whole day, with 80-100 people listening.
We also learned a lot about things that people are looking for in Neo4j, mostly import/export, OLAP support and issues relating to dense nodes. Remoting and Cypher performance were other topics that are brought up. Fortunately we’re working on most of those themes in 2013.
Below is a series of projects related to Neo4j that we found particularly interesting:
- Linkurious, the great Neo4j-visualization frontend from our Sebastien Heyman and our friends behind gephi
- Axel and Christian Morgner working with us on neo4j.org and providing structr awesomeness
- Open Citation and related-work.net working on making the scientific publication an open, great and innovative place again worked on by Rene Pickardt and Heinrich Hartman. We saw a number of other ideas in a similar vein from Alfredas Chmieliauskas
- Alfredas uses Neo4j in energy market simulations
- Davy Suvee using Neo4j in a variety of projects
- Squire a movie recommender application worked on by Alberto Perdomo from Aentos who also work on a hosted Neo4j service called GrapheneDB
- Evgeny Gazdovsky and Dmitriy Shabanov working on Animotron
- using Neo4j for software metrics
- Michael talked about the new Neo4j HA architecture and Peter explained the ideas behind the Linked Data Benchmark Council (LDBC)
A big thanks to Pere Urbon, Achim Friedland, Sebastien Heyman and Claudio Martella for the organization of the event.
We had a great time and are happy that we met so many of you even if there was little time to talk in depth. Hope to see everyone again soon.
