Monthly Archives: January 2012

Jan 30 2012
7 Comments
Gremlin, Neography

Who is the Greatest?

I done wrestled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale, only last week I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick. I’m so mean I make medicine sick.

He floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee, but is Muhammad Ali truly the greatest? Greater than the Beatles? Greater than Alexander? Greater than Sliced Bread? Let’s find out.

We begin by requiring neography and creating a function to help us create the greats.

require 'rubygems'
require 'neography'

def create_great(name)
  Neography::Node.create("name" => name)
end

There are a ton of greats out there, but we’ll keep it simple and create just 8 of the greatest greats.
Continue reading →

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Jan 27 2012
2 Comments
Heroku, Neography

Chicago Graph DB Meet-Up

We had our first Graph Database Meet-up in Chicago yesterday!

16 Graphistas came out to learn more about the craft and get an introduction to Neo4j. Ryan Briones from Groupon gave us a venue and helped host the event. No worries if you missed it, your next chance to learn more about Neo4j is coming up on Tuesday February 7th @ 6pm, when Prasanna Pendse will share his experiences with Neo4j at ChicagoRuby: Downtown.

Our next Chicago Graph DB meet-up is tentatively scheduled for February 29th @ 6 pm. This will be a hands-on meet-up. I’ll help you get started with either Neo4j on your laptop or in the cloud with Heroku. We’ll create a few graphs, learn some basic traversals and get comfortable with Neo4j. I’ll have a GitHub repository graph for us to play with and see how you are connected to Kevin Bacon (err I mean Linus Torvalds). He is the center of the GitHub universe right? Right? We’ll let’s find out.

The slides of our first meet-up are available below:

Intro to Neo4j with Ruby

View more presentations from Max De Marzi

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Jan 18 2012
1 Comment
Heroku, Neography

Neo4j on Heroku – Part Three

This week we learned that leaving the create_graph method accessible to the world was a bad idea. So let’s go ahead and delete that route in Sinatra, and instead create a Rake Task for it.

In Rakefile:

require 'neography/tasks'
require './neoflix.rb'

namespace :neo4j do
  task :create do
    neo = Neography::Rest.new(ENV['NEO4J_URL'] || "http://localhost:7474")
    create_graph(neo)
  end
end

That’s much better. We can create our graph locally with
Continue reading →

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Jan 16 2012
4 Comments
Gremlin, Neography

Neo4j on Heroku – Part Two

We are picking up where we left off on Neo4j on Heroku –Part One so make sure you’ve read it or you’ll be a little lost. So far, we have cloned the Neoflix project, set up our Heroku application and added the Neo4j add-on to our application. We are now ready to populate our graph.

UPDATE: Learn a better way to create the graph in part 3 of my Neo4j on Heroku series.

Bring up two browser windows. On one you’ll go to your Neo4j instance running on Heroku, 

$ heroku config
NEO4J_URL      => http://xxxxxxxx:yyyyyyyy@70825a524.hosted.neo4j.org:7014

and on the other you’ll go to the create_graph route of your app. So if you named your app neoflix, you’d go to neoflix dot herokuapp dot com/create_graph.

This will run the create_graph method and you’ll see nodes and relationships being created on the Neo4j Dashboard. It’s just over a million relationships, so it will take a few minutes. There are faster ways to load data into Neo4j (wait for part three of this series), but this will work in our case.
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Jan 13 2012
5 Comments
Gremlin, Heroku, Neography

Neo4j on Heroku – Part One

On his blog Marko A. Rodriguez showed us how to make A Graph-Based Movie Recommender Engine with Gremlin and Neo4j.

In this two part series, we are going to take his work from the Gremlin shell and put it on the web using the Heroku Neo4j add-on and altering the Neovigator project for our use case. Heroku has a great article on how to get an example Neo4j application up and running on their Dev Center and Michael Hunger shows you how to add JRuby extensions and provides sample code using the Neo4j.rb Gem by Andreas Ronge.

We are going to follow their recipe, but we are going to add a little spice. Instead of creating a small 2 node, 1 relationship graph, I am going to show you how to leverage the power of Gremlin and Groovy to build a much larger graph from a set of files.

Let’s start by cloning the Neoflix Sinatra application, and instead of installing and starting Neo4j locally, we are going to create a Heroku application, and add Neo4j.

git clone git@github.com:maxdemarzi/neoflix.git
cd neoflix
bundle install
heroku apps:create neoflix --stack cedar
heroku addons:add neo4j
git push heroku master

Continue reading →

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Jan 11 2012
10 Comments
Neography, Visualization

Graph Visualization and Neo4j

So far we’ve learned how to get Neo4j up and running with Neography, how to find friends of friends and degrees of separation with the Neo4j REST API and a little bit of the Gremlin and Cypher languages. However, all we’ve seen is text output. We haven’t really “seen” a graph yet, but that’s about to change.

Vouched holds a graph of skill specific recommendations people have made to each other and visualizes it. I extracted the visualization, and hosted it on github as neovigator. You can get your very own visualization up and running or take a look at this instance running on Heroku.

Continue reading →

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Jan 07 2012
7 Comments
Cypher, Neography

Cypher with Neography

Cypher is the query language of Neo4j, and as promised I’ll show you how you can use it to implement friend recommendations as well as degrees of separation.

We can send any cypher query to Neo4j via the REST API and neography using the execute_query command. Let’s implement suggestions_for so it sends a cypher query to the server:

def suggestions_for(node)
  node_id = node["self"].split('/').last.to_i
  @neo.execute_query("START me = node({node_id})
                      MATCH (me)-[:friends]->(friend)-[:friends]->(foaf)
                      RETURN foaf.name", {:node_id => node_id})["data"]
end

puts "Johnathan should become friends with #{suggestions_for(johnathan).join(', ')}"

# RESULT
# Johnathan should become friends with Mary, Phil

Continue reading →

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Jan 06 2012
10 Comments
Gremlin, Neography

Gremlin with Neography

Gremlin is a domain specific language for traversing property graphs. Neo4j is one of the databases that can speak the gremlin language, and as promised I’ll show you how you can use it to implement friend recommendations as well as degrees of separation.

We can send any gremlin script to Neo4j via the REST API and neography using the execute_script command. Let’s implement suggestions_for so it sends a gremlin script to the server:

def suggestions_for(node)
  node_id = node["self"].split('/').last.to_i
  @neo.execute_script("g.v(node_id).
                         in('friends').
                         in('friends').
                         dedup.
                         filter{it != g.v(node_id)}.
                         name", {:node_id => node_id})
end

puts "Johnathan should become friends with #{suggestions_for(johnathan).join(', ')}"

# RESULT
# Johnathan should become friends with Mary, Phil

Continue reading →

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Jan 05 2012
5 Comments
Neography

How you’re connected to Kevin Bacon

Previously I showed you how to get Neo4j up and running with Ruby and how to find recommended friends on a social network. What about finding out how you are connected to someone outside of your friends of friends network? Do you remember the concept of six degrees of separation? No, how about six degrees of Kevin Bacon?

A credit card commercial explains how this works:

The actor, Kevin Bacon wants to write a check to buy a book, but the clerk asks for his ID, which he does not have. He leaves and returns with a group of people, then says to the clerk, “Okay, I was in a movie with an extra, Eunice, whose hairdresser, Wayne, attended Sunday school with Father O’Neill, who plays racquetball with Dr. Sanjay, who recently removed the appendix of Kim, who dumped you sophomore year. So you see, we’re practically brothers.”

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Jan 04 2012
30 Comments
Neography

Getting started with Ruby and Neo4j

Getting started with Ruby and Neo4j is very easy.
Follow these steps and you’ll be up and running in no time.

First we install the neography gem:

Using Bundler:

echo "source 'http://rubygems.org'
gem 'neography' " > Gemfile
bundle install

Without Bundler:

gem install neography

Then we’ll add our tasks to a Rakefile, download Neo4j and start it:

echo "require 'neography/tasks'" > Rakefile
rake neo4j:install
rake neo4j:start

Continue reading →

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