From the Neo4j Community: January 2017

The year is off to a great start when to comes to the Neo4j community. If this month is any indication of what’s to come, then we know that 2017 will be a big year for Neo4j projects, drivers and integrations across the board. Here are some of our favorite picks from last month’s Neo4j community contributions.

If you would like to see your post featured in February’s “From the Neo4j Community” blog post, follow us on Twitter and use the #Neo4j hashtag for your chance to get picked.

Articles and Blog Posts

• The big news in January was the release of Buzzfeed’s TrumpWorld dataset and Michael Hunger created a GraphGist showing how to import the data into Neo4j. William Lyon then went a step further and combined The BuzzFeed Trumpworld Graph with Government Contracting Data in Neo4j.
• Evgeniy Prohorenko analyzed the USA election of 2016 using Apache Spark GraphX and Neo4j and found some interesting insights in the type of language used in tweets by both candidates.
• Emmanuel Stefanakis explained the history of geospatial features in Neo4j and how the recent creation of spatial procedures will boost the spread of graph databases in the GIS community.
• Max de Marzi wrote a hands-on guide showing how to extend the security features introduced in Neo4j 3.1 to achieve Property-Level Security. If you like roaring bitmaps and bit shifting this is the post for you.
• Max also wrote another post showing how to multi-thread a traversal to massively reduce the response time.
• 42 Talents published an article showing how to use Neo4j and open data to find out DIY facts and figures for your favorite sport. Tennis is the chosen sport in this example, but even if you’re not a tennis fan, there are lots of graph modeling tips and LOAD CSV examples to gain inspiration from.
• Neo4j founder Emil Eifrem features in a guest post on Brian McKenna’s Computer Weekly column – graph and the next wave of Digital Public Services.
• Reed Jessen wrote a cool blog post showing how to load patent data from the IP Street API into Neo4j. Reed then shows how to query the data using Neo4j’s Python driver and finds an interesting case of Hit-By-A-Bus Syndrome at Magic Leap.
• Kristof van Tomme introduces the new Drupal Neo4j Module that integrates with the Rules module. The new module uses Christophe Willemsen‘s PHP Bolt Driver.
• Chuck Calio explains how Neo4j on IBM POWER8 makes it possible to store and process massive-scale graphs in real time.
• ComputerWorld UK’s Scott Carey interviewed David Meza, NASA’s Chief Knowledge Architect, who explained how NASA are using Neo4j to allow researchers and external stakeholders to more easily navigate NASA’s complex web of documents. David has previously talked about his workin our 5-Minute Interview series.
• Michael Hunger created a graph for the OOP 2017 Munich Conference in which he makes good use of the apoc.load.json procedure from the APOC library.
• Brian Roy wrote a blog post in which he used Neo4j to analyze the accuracy of images classified by the AWS Rekognition API. Brian then follows up with another post where he looks at the distribution of confidence values returned by the API.
• Big Datums shared some Cypher queries showing how to count relationships in Neo4j. This is one of the first things that people do when they’ve just imported a dataset.

Graph Visualisation

• Tom Sawyer released Version 7.6, Java Edition, Beta Release of their Tom Sawyer Perspectives product – a graph visualisation tool. This release introduces support for maps to display location based information.
• Duke Ganote uses Neo4j to visualize a complex organizational hierarchy.
• The Graphileon blog features a post showing how to evaluate logical hierarchies and rules. The video shows some impressive Cypher queries that use the APOC library.
• Graph Commons created a visualization titled “The Trump Network,” which shows the power relations around Donald Trump and how they’re linked to each other and other organizations.
• Right Relevance’s John Swain shows how to visualize the climate change conversation on Twitter in 2016. There’s also some cool use of graph algorithms to find the biggest influencers and communities within the climate change graph.
• JeffProd released Twitter Network, an online tool which allows you to visualize the relationships between Twitter accounts. Give it a try with your own account, it’s quite fun!

Videos

• Linkurious – Strengthening Anti-money Laundering (AML) systems with graph technologies

Language Drivers

• January saw the release of version 1.1.0 of the JavaScript, Python, and .NET drivers. It also saw the release of version 1.1.1 of the Java driver.
• Nigel Small released version 4.0.0b2 of py2neo – a Python client library and toolkit for Neo4j. This release introduced a new Cypher console and CLI tool.
• Florin Patrascu released version 0.2.16 of neo4j_sips – a Neo4j driver for Elixir which now throws an error if drive authentication fails and has Travis CI support.

Libraries, GraphGists, and Code Repos

• Neo4j OGM (Object-Graph-Mapper) for use in Ruby on Rails and Rack frameworks released version 8.0.5 which has some bug fixes and improved documentation for importing lots of data into Neo4j.
• Jens Nerche explains how he developed a plugin for jQAssistant, the code analysis tool, so that he could use it to analyze a C++ project. In other news, jQAssistant released version 1.2.0 which now has support for rule parameters.
• Gunnar Morling also writes about his use of jQAssistant to prevent leaky APIs in his Java code base. If you haven’t used jQAssistant before, this post provides a step-by-step walkthrough of how to get started. Gunnar has also created a demo project showing how to use the tool.
• James Glattfelder shared the Neo4j tutorial from the “Network Analysis and Visualization Tools” session that he presented at the Big Data Finance Winter School in Zurich.
• Sean Cheatham released version 0.0.2 of scala-graph – a collection of Scala graph libraries and adapters for graph databases.
• Rasmus Précenth created the eta-neo4j-example repository which looks like a pretty cool attempt to write user-defined procedures and functions using the Eta programming language. Eta is a dialect of Haskell that runs on the JVM.
• From Node.js land, Bruce Paul released ger-neo4j – a good enough recommendation engine using Neo4j. It focuses on domains which have categories and items, so it’d probably work well for ecommerce applications.
• Andreas Kollegger released neo4j-here, a Node.js package to help manage a local Neo4j installation.
• Jon Winton released amphora-redis-to-neo4j, which converts Redis batch ops into Neo4j Cypher queries.
• Julia Fernee created the up-neo4j-service-files repository, which contains configuration for launching Neo4j in a Docker container.
• In related news, Joaquin Menchaca released neo4j-kit, which makes it easy to spin up an instance of Neo4j using Docker or Vagrant.
• Knowledge.Bio – a web application for collaboratively building and exploring networks of biological relationships was released in mid January. The code is available on BitBucket if you’d like to explore further.