This Week in Neo4j – 8 April 2017


Welcome to this week in Neo4j, where we round up what’s been happening in the world of graph database in the last seven days.

This week we look at how to create a Twitter clone using Neo4j, the Neo4j data science stack, learning Chinese and much more!


This week’s featured Neo4j community member is Tomaz Bratanic

Explore everything that's happening in the Neo4j community for the week of 8 April 2017

Tomaz Bratanic – This week’s featured community member

Tomaz only recently came onto the Neo4j scene but has been quick to get going and blogs about Neo4j at an incredible rate.

Over the last few weeks these are some of Tomaz’s posts:

Tomaz also created the hospitals-neo4j project which brings together the above blog posts while analysing a hospital dataset.

Tomaz has also created a Neo4j Browser guide which you can try out by executing the following command in the query window of your Neo4j Browser:

:play https://guides.neo4j.com/contrib/hospital.html

On behalf of the Neo4j community, thanks Tomaz! I’m looking forward to see what else you come up with for APOC Awareness month.

Building a Twitter Clone with Neo4j


Max De Marzi has written a new series of posts showing how to build a Twitter clone with Neo4j.

    • Part One in which Max explains his approach to Neo4j POCs and designs an initial graph data model.
    • Part Two in which Max shows how to build a Twitter-esque HTTP API and create/retrieve users.
    • Part Three in which Max adds functionality to follow other users and see who we’ve followed and who’s followed us.
    • Part Four in which Max adds functionality to add tags and edit posts (a feature Twitter doesn’t actually have!)

Automated Static Malware Analysis using Neo4j


The MalwareGroup posted a really cool talk by Marion Marscalek and Raphael Vinot in which they show how to combine Neo4j and radare to analyse malware.



The Neo4j Data Science Stack, Open Data, and PageRank with APOC


There were lots of blog articles this week in the Neo4j community!

On GitHub: Chinese Language Exploration, PHP OGM, d3.js


Learning Chinese with Neo4j

Modelling the Chinese language in Neo4j

On my GitHub travels, I came across the following projects which are worth a look:

    • Diego Rodrigues created chinese_exp where he shows how to use data to explore and learn the Chinese language. Fernando Izquierdo also presented on the same topic at the London meetup a couple of months ago.
    • Marco Falcier has has been building on top of Christophe Willemsen‘s Laravel Neo4j PHP OGM example project .
    • Christophe himself created neo4j-ogm-symfony-security, where he creates a quick PoC showing how to use a custom UserProvider backed by a Neo4j graph database.
    • Bogdans Afonins created two example projects for Spring Data Neo4j 4.2. A simple retail example in the SpringMVC-Neo4j-App and a social network one in spring-data-neo4j-4.2.0-example.
    • Dino Fancellu created neo4j-d3v4, a proof of concept project that gets data via the JavaScript driver and feeds it into a d3.js v4 force simulation.

From the Neo4j Knowledge Base


The Neo4j Knowledge Base is a collection of Frequently Asked Questions maintained by Neo4j’s Customer Success team.

If you’re doing some hands-on work with Neo4j, at some stage you’ll want to port the users/roles and constraints/indexes from your staging environment to production.

The following articles describe queries that will automatically generate Cypher statements to do this and save you having to rebuild them from scratch.

Next Week


So what’s happening next week in the world of graphs?

Tweets of the Week


My favorite tweet this week was by @tmanning who spent last weekend modelling Whitehouse personal financial disclosures documents in Neo4j as part of a Data4Democracy event.


That’s all for this week. Have a great weekend!

Cheers, Mark