Graphistania 2.0 - Episode 8 - The one after the Covid-summer

No sure if we should be happy or sad - but hey - the Covid-19 summer of 2020 is almost behind us. Like most people, I found it quite a strange and unusual summer, with very few foreign adventures (although I did manage to squeeze in a cycling/camping trip to the French Alps in July), lots of cycling, some great family time... and of course lots of time with graphs :) ... 

So that means that we are also kicking the Graphistania podcast back into gear - here's the next episode for you:

Graphistania · Graphistania 2.0 - Episode 8

Here's the transcript of our conversation:

RVB: 00:00:15.863 [music] Hey, Stefan, I do need to ask you for consent, I think, right?

SW: 00:00:19.847 Hi. Yeah, I consent. [laughter] This is always the weird moment.

RVB: 00:00:24.727 Exactly. I thought, "Start with that one again."

SW: 00:00:28.436 Exactly, just to create a little bit of tension in the air.

Read more »

Executives of Belgian Public Companies - revisited!

Long time ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Neo4j was just a tiny cute little junior graph database ;-),  I wrote a 2 part blogpost about a newspaper article that I had come across in De Tijd about the network of executives of Belgian public companies. You can find the articles over here: Part 1 and Part 2. Turns out - and I really was not aware of this until recently - that the newspaper has been running this type of publication on a yearly basis. Here's another article from 2018 on De Tijd’s website.

So imagine my surprise a few weeks ago, when I was contacted by one of the authors of that article, Thomas Roelens, to verify some info for the 2020 edition of this analysis. We had a great chat, and Thomas basically asked me to double check some of the analysis that he had done himself already. So, contrary to what happened in 2017 (where I had to dig into the HTML source to download the info from the website - Thomas just sent it to me, and basically allowed me to take it for a spin :) ...

Meanwhile, Thomas' article has been published in the newspaper: you can find it over here or over here. But here's my update below too.

Read more »

Part 2/2: looking at the Web of Belgian Public Companies in Neo4j

Yesterday, I published part 1 of this short little blogpost on how we could load the dataset of a great newspaper article in De Tijd (our local financial/economic newspaper) into Neo4j. Of course, the whole point of that loading process (all of which is easily copied from github, btw) is to be able to do some additional querying on the dataset - just because we can :) ... So let's do some simple queries here, and then you can of course explore this some more yourself!

Start with some simple queries

In the article above, one of the key figures in the web of public companies, is Luc Bertrand, the CEO of Ackermans & Van Haaren - a former dredging company that turned into a holding company. Let's explore the network around him - by walking the paths from his node for three hops.

//network around Luc Bertrand 

match path = (m:Male)-[r*..3]-(n) 

where m.name contains "Bertrand"return path

That query gives us a nice little graph that we can explore:

Read more »

Part 1/2: looking at the Web of Belgian Public Companies in Neo4j

Just a few days ago I came across an interesting article on Belgium's premier economic newspaper - (De Tijd, the local equivalent of the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal) that was over here:

The title of the article is "The Spider's web of publicly traded Belgium", referring to the web of companies, ceo's, chairmen and directors for the 126 public companies that Belgium still has.
Read more »