Article originally posted on Dataveristy
Are you able to get a really good look at what the data in your graph database can tell you? A graph database such as Aurelius’ Titan, Franz’ AllegroGraph, Google’s Cayley, Neo Technologies Neo4j, Objectivity’s InfiniteGraph, and Ontotext’s GraphDB lets you store semi-structured data linked together by relationships in a graph and make inferences from existing facts. On their own, they are incredibly powerful for use cases that involve making and traversing data connections, such as social network interactions, e-commerce recommendations, financial transactions, and mapping network dependencies.
But that power can increase when graph data visualization tools enter the picture to make it easier for business users to search, investigate, and analyze data, exposing patterns and trends within a graph’s content that mere mortals can quickly identify and react to.
“Data visualization matters because it is a technique with which humans can understand data,” says Jean Villedieu, co-founder of Linkurious, which unveiled its Linkurious Enterprise graph data visualization platform for Neo4j this spring. That understanding helps people make critical decisions, whether it’s freezing a bank account after spotting a suspicious pattern in financial interactions across entities that could indicate money laundering, or determining from relationships the next piece of hardware among network components that may be subject to failure and the group of users that could affect, so that network administrators can quickly react to the issue.
Linkurious’ Enterprise software joins other solutions that can propel graph data visualizations, including its own linkurious.js. That is a graph visualization library like D3.js, Keylines, VivaGraph and Sigma.js, he explains. Linkurious’ solution actually leverages Sigma.js for its graph data structure and visualization engine. Linkurious has enhanced Sigma.js beyond its efficiency as a graph viewer for the application development market with higher-lever and integration-ready features, such as filters and Excel exporters, for creating smart graph applications, and with some 20 plug-ins to improve its core with new interaction features. There also is Gephi, an Open Source graph visualization tool that is popular among scientists and Data Scientists. In fact, Linkurious CEO Sebastian Heymann co-created Gephi, which has been downloaded about one million times in its latest incarnation. Neo4J has its own built-in data visualization tool, too, based on the D3.js library for manipulating documents based on data.
“In the market you have visualization libraries, that require team plus resources to integrate, and tools for scientists,” says Villedieu. “The big difference of Linkurious Enterprise is that it’s easy to use and works out of the box.”
Keywords: Dataversity • graph database • Linkurious