A few weeks ago I blogged about Activities in Neo4j, and we ended up with a way to recommend an activity to a user based on what sequence of activities they had done in the past. We also had a list of common sequences of activities, but they were a bit hard to digest. Today I’m going to show you how to visualize them so they make more sense.
The “footprints in the sand” poem is a story of a person walking on the beach with God and seeing two sets of footprints. The footprints represent the joys and sorrows of this persons life. During the worst of times the trail shows just one set of footprints. Confused as to why they would be abandoned at their time of need, God replies that “when you see only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you”. It’s a touching poem, but a single set of footprints in the sand isn’t very graphy. Things get interesting when you superimpose the paths one over the other. We can then start to see where many paths converged and diverged, see how deep the footprints got at times, when they split where they went and where did they end up.
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Max De Marzi 