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 releases of APOC and the Neo4j JDBC Driver, a paper explaining how to derive socially useful information from public blockchains, a refresh of the Neo4j ETL guide, and more!
Featured Community Member: Michael Graham
This week’s featured community member is Michael Graham, Full Stack Developer.
Michael Graham – This Week’s Featured Community Member
Michael Graham has recently been exploring using Neo4j with GraphQL. He’s the author of the the neo4j-graphql-bindings and neo4j-graphql-server npm packages, which make it easier to build GraphQL APIs using the neo4j-graphql database plugin. He previously worked as a developer at University of California – Riverside working on online tools for teaching symbolic logic.
Most recently Michael has been working with my colleague Will Lyon on neo4j-graphql-js, a GraphQL to Cypher query execution layer for Neo4j and JavaScript GraphQL implementations.
On behalf of the Neo4j community, thanks for all your work Michael!
How Graphs Revolutionize Identity and Access Management
Lju Lazaravic presented a webinar in which she explained why Neo4j is such a great fit for Identity and Access Management.
Lju takes us through a worked example of a person working in a organisation with a complex hierarchy, and shows how we can use a graph to determine what resources the person should have access to. Lju finishes the talk by going through some case studies of Neo4j customers who are using graphs to solve these types of problems.
When should I use a graph database?, 3D graphs, ETL guide refresh
- In How Do You Know If a Graph Database Solves the Problem?, Jennifer Reif describes different use cases where a graph database may or may not make sense. If you’re wondering whether to use Neo4j for your next project, this post will help you make your decision.
- Jennifer has also done a complete refresh of the Neo4j ETL guide. In this guide Jennifer explains how to get up and running with the Neo4j ETL Tool, and then takes us through a guided tour of the tool while importing data from a Postgres database.
- Michael Hunger wrote a blog post in which he shows how to visualize graphs in 3D with WebGL using the 3d-force-graph library.
Releases: APOC, Neo4j JDBC Driver, Tom Sawyer Perspectives
There were lots of releases this week!
First up was Tom Sawyer Perspectives which released version 8.2. This release contains Model-Based Engineering enhancements and the ability to save to Neo4j.
Neo4j JDBC Driver version 3.4.0 was released. This version contains support for the spatial and temporal data types introduced in Neo4j 3.4. It also has full clustering and routing support.
And finally, we had the summer release of APOC. This version added support for reverse geocoding in apoc.spatial, base 64 URL encoding and decoding, new apoc.diff user functions, and much more
Blockchain Analytics, Meta Data Graph Models, Biological Knowledge Networks
- Dan McGinn has published a paper titled Towards open data blockchain analytics: a Bitcoin perspective in which he describes how to use Neo4j to derive socially useful information from public blockchains.
- Thomas Frisendal shows how to build a graph data model directly from meta data stored in XML files in his latest blog post titled The Emergence of ”Metadata Science”? Using Graph Technology for Data Modeling
- Towards FAIRer Biological Knowledge Networks Using a Hybrid Linked Data and Graph Database Approach, a paper written by Marco Brandizi, Ajit Pratap Singh, Chris Rawlings, and Keywan Hassani-Pak has been published. The authors have developed a simple application ontology based on OWL/RDF with mappings to standard schemas. They show how to use this ontology to power data access services like resolvable URIs, SPARQL endpoints, JSON-LD web APIs and Neo4j-based knowledge graphs.
Tweet of the Week
My favourite tweet this week was by Daniel Hoadley:
I think I may be addicted to @neo4j #graphs
— Daniel Hoadley (@DanHLawReporter) August 9, 2018
Don’t forget to RT if you liked it too.
That’s all for this week. Have a great weekend!
Cheers, Mark
