Did you know you can write Javascript in the Neo4j console to access the Neo4j API?
Try it. Open up your Neo4j Web Admin Console and type:
neo4j-sh (0)$ eval db
EmbeddedGraphDatabase [data/graph.db]
OMG! I know, Neo4j is crazy. So much to play with, I’ve been at it for a few years and I haven’t even dug into this area. What else can we do here?
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I was introduced to the open-source performance testing tool Gatling a few months ago by Dustin Barnes and fell in love with it. It has an easy to use DSL, and even though I don’t know a lick of Scala, I was able to figure out how to use it. It creates pretty awesome graphics and takes care of a lot of work for you behind the scenes. They have great documentation and a pretty active google group where newbies and questions are welcomed.
It ships with Scala, so all you need to do is create your tests and use a command line to execute it. I’ll show you how to do a few basic things, like test that you have everything working, then we’ll create nodes and relationships, and then query those nodes.
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Update: Facebook has disabled this application
Your app is replicating core Facebook functionality.
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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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:
We’ll start off by logging on to Amazon Web Services and creating a Virtual Private Cloud:
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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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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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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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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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.
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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Max De Marzi 