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.
This week we have a tool for exploring large Knowledge Graphs, analysing YouTube videos using NLP techniques, multiple linear regression on graphs, data modelling for beginners, and tips for using Neo4j SDN and OGM.
Featured Community Member: Michael McKenzie
This week’s featured community member is Michael McKenzie, Project Engineer at Encompass, Inc.
Michael McKenzie – This Week’s Featured Community Member
Michael is a relatively new, but extremely enthusiastic, member of the Neo4j community, and after powering through all the online content, he realised that he wanted to find some other people to talk graphs with in real life.
With some encouragement from our equally enthusiastic colleague Karin, Michael agreed to take over the Neo4j D.C.-area meetup group and ran his first event a couple of weeks ago. He wrote an experience report about it on the Neo4j blog this week.
On behalf of the Neo4j community, welcome Michael, and good luck with your future meetup events!
If you’d like to follow in Michael’s footsteps and get more involved with the community, we’ve recently launched the Neo4j Community Maven program.
Online Meetup: Exploring large Knowledge Graphs with MetaExp
This week on the online meetup Sebastian Bischoff and Fabian Stolp presented MetaExp, a system they built that assists the user during the exploration of large knowledge graphs, given two sets of initial nodes.
You can find the slides from the talk and a paper describing their work in more detail. As part of the project they also wrote the Random Walk algorithm, which was recently added to the Graph Algorithms library.
Certification Tips, Visual Graph Editor, Approximate Betweenness Centrality
- Peter Heisig wrote a blog post in which he explains some visual graph editing features he added to the Neo4j browser to enable rapid model prototyping and evolution.
- Chris von Csefalvay timeless post containing tips for passing Neo4j certification made a reappearance this week. If you like that you can also read Jennifer Reif‘s advice for passing the test.
- Tomaž Bratanič wrote a blog post explaining how to use the approximate betweenness centrality algorithm on a Twitter dataset.
- Nick Doyle has written a deep dive explaining Cypher’s OPTIONAL MATCH clause via a worked example on the movies dataset.
- Elise Devaux explores the possibilities graph databases and graph exploration tools offer for intelligence analysis.
Neo4j SDN and OGM tips.
Michael Simons has started writing a series of posts sharing his best tips for using Neo4j OGM and SDN.
- Understand the Neo4j Cypher and OGM type system
- Use multiple, different connections to Neo4j instances in a Spring Boot application
- Create SDN repositories that find nodes by arbitrary properties
Graph Databases for Beginners
This week we have some good resources for beginners to get started with Neo4j and graph databases.
My colleague Bryce has written a blog post in which he takes us through the modeling decisions you might have to make if you were designing a graph for an email fraud detection application and explains common pitfalls that we should try to avoid.
We also recently published a new eBook – Getting Started with Cypher: A Beginner’s Guide to the Graph Query Language, which is a great place to start if you want to quickly learn how to derive insights from your graph data.
NLP Analysis of YouTube videos, Multiple Linear Regression, Deep dive on OPTIONAL MATCH
- Christophe Willemsen has written a blog post in which he analyses the Neo4j Youtube channel video transcripts, extract some insights and show what type of business value such analysis can bring.
- In Graphs and ML: Multiple Linear Regression Lauren Shin explains how she wrote procedures that can create a linear regression model with multiple independent variables, and then demonstrates how to use them on a short term rental listing graph.
- David Allen explains how to go from “I don’t have a Kubernetes cluster” to running Cypher in Neo4j inside of a Kubernetes cluster in about 10 minutes in his latest blog post.
- David has also written a post showing how to quickly launch a Neo4j Community Edition VM on AWS.
Next Week
What’s happening next week in the world of graph databases?
| Date | Title | Group |
|---|---|---|
August 8th 2018 |
Tweet of the Week
My favourite tweet this week was by Simon Hewitt:
Every database should look at @neo4j for what should be the minimum UI you get out of the box. Astounding what you get for free
— Simon Hewitt (@tyndyll) August 1, 2018
Don’t forget to RT if you liked it too.
That’s all for this week. Have a great weekend!
Cheers, Mark
