Jan 28 2013
17 Comments
Cypher, Heroku, Neography, Problems

Facebook Graph Search with Cypher and Neo4j

Update: Facebook has disabled this application

Your app is replicating core Facebook functionality.

neo_graph_search_screen_shot

Facebook Graph Search has given the Graph Database community a simpler way to explain what it is we do and why it matters. I wanted to drive the point home by building a proof of concept of how you could do this with Neo4j. However, I don’t have six months or much experience with NLP (natural language processing). What I do have is Cypher. Cypher is Neo4j’s graph language and it makes it easy to express what we are looking for in the graph. I needed a way to take “natural language” and create Cypher from it. This was going to be a problem.
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Dec 14 2012
5 Comments
Deployment

Setting up a Neo4j Cluster on Amazon

There are multiple ways to setup a Neo4j Cluster on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and I want to show you one way to do it.

Overview:

  1. Create a VPC
  2. Launch 1 Instance
  3. Install Neo4j HA
  4. Clone 2 Instances
  5. Configure the Instances
  6. Start the Coordinators
  7. Start the Neo4j Cluster
  8. Create 2 Load Balancers
  9. Next Steps

We’ll start off by logging on to Amazon Web Services and creating a Virtual Private Cloud:


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Nov 27 2012
1 Comment
Java

Pathfinding with Neo4j Unmanaged Extensions

In Extending Neo4j I showed you how to create an unmanaged extension to warm up the node and relationship caches. Let’s try doing something more interesting like exposing the A* (A Star) search algorithm through the REST API. The graph we created earlier looks like this:
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Nov 26 2012
19 Comments
Cypher, Java

Extending Neo4j

One of the great things about Neo4j is how easy it is to extend it. You can extend Neo4j with Plugins and Unmanaged Extensions. Two great examples of plugins are the Gremlin Plugin (which lets you use the Gremlin library with Neo4j) and the Spatial Plugin (which lets you perform spatial operations like searching for data within specified regions or within a specified distance of a point of interest).

Plugins are meant to extend the capabilities of the database, nodes, or relationships. Unmanaged extensions are meant to let you do anything you want. This great power comes with great responsibility, so be careful what you do here. David Montag cooked up an unmanaged extension template for us to use on github so lets give it a whirl. We are going to clone the project, compile it, download Neo4j, configure Neo4j to use the extension, test the extension and tweak it a bit.
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Nov 14 2012
6 Comments
Cypher, Heroku, Neography, Visualization

CrunchBase on Neo4j

NeoTechnology was featured on TechCrunch after raising a Series B round, and it has an entry on CrunchBase. If you look at CrunchBase closely you’ll notice it’s a graph. Who invested in what, who co-invested, what are the common investment themes between investors, how are companies connected by board members, etc. These are questions we can ask of the graph and are well suited for graph databases.
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Oct 18 2012
10 Comments
Cypher, Heroku, Neography, Problems

Matches are the New Hotness

How do you help a person without a job find one online? A search screen. How do you help a person find love online? A search screen. How do you find which camera to buy online? A search screen. How do you help a sick person self diagnose online? I have no idea, I go to the doctor. Doesn’t matter, what I want to tell you is that there is another way.
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Oct 11 2012
4 Comments
Cypher, Visualization

Hubway Data Visualization Challenge with Neo4j

Michael Hunger imported the Hubway Challenge dataset into a Neo4j graph database, and made it available for us to play with.
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Oct 03 2012
1 Comment
Problems, Random

Hunting Trolls with Neo4j!

Allison Sparrow shared a link to Patentula, a company interested in finding better ways to explore patent data and hunt patent trolls. What caught my attention is this quote from the video below:

What we tried to do with it, is bypass any sort of keyword processing in order to find similar patents. The reason we’ve done this is to avoid the problems encountered by other systems that rely on natural language processing or semantic analysis simply because patents are built to avoid detection by similar keywords…we use network topology (specifically citation network topology) to mine the US patent database in order to predict similar documents.

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Sep 07 2012
1 Comment
Problems, Random

Networks, Crowds, and Markets


I’ve had “Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World” by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg on my bookshelf for a few months now, and a conversation with a client reminded me that I hadn’t finished reading it (barely started really). It is available from Cambridge University Press, but also on the web and in PDF format.
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Aug 17 2012
23 Comments
Cypher, Heroku, Neography, Visualization

NeoSocial: Connecting to Facebook with Neo4j

Social applications and Graph Databases go together like peanut butter and jelly. I’m going to walk you through the steps of building an application that connects to Facebook, pulls your friends and likes data and visualizes it. I plan on making a video of me coding it one line at a time, but for now let’s just focus on the main elements.
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