Virtual Nodes & Relationships (Graph Projections)
Virtual Nodes and Relationships don’t exist in the graph, they are only returned by a query, and can be used to represent a graph projection.
They can be used to visually project data, for example aggregating relationships into one, or collapsing intermediate nodes into virtual relationships. We could project a citation graph into a virtual author-author or paper-paper graph with aggregated relationships between them, or even turn Twitter data into a user-user mention graph.
We can combine real and virtual entities, for example by creating a virtual relationship between two real nodes or creating a virtual relationship from a virtual node to a real node.
Below are some other uses of virtual entities:
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return only a few properties of nodes/rels to the visualization, e.g. if you have huge text properties
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visualize clusters found by graph algorithms
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aggregate information to a higher level of abstraction
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skip intermediate nodes in a longer path
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hide away properties or intermediate nodes/relationships for security reasons
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graph grouping
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visualization of data from other sources (computation, RDBMS, document-dbs, CSV, XML, JSON) as graph without even storing it
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projecting partial data
There are a few things to keep in mind when using virtual nodes:
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For more information on how to use these procedures, see: