Exploring the Paris Terrorist Attack network - part 3/3

Previously, on this blog, I had started writing about how we could get some of the data published by a local Belgian newspaper, De Standaard, on the Paris Terrorist Attack Network into Neo4j. In

• Part 1, we talked about loading the raw JSON data into Neo4j, and then in
• Part 2, we cleaned up some of the data for easy querying in Neo4j. 

So that's where we are. To wrap things up, I just wanted to illustrate some of the results and queries in Neo4j around some of the most interesting figures in this Terrorist network. I started some of my explorations around a widely reported terrorist, and Belgian national, called Salah Abdeslam.

So let's take a look at Salah in Neo4j.

Read more »

Exploring the Paris Terrorist Attack network - part 2/3

In part 1 of this blogpost series, we got the basic Paris Terrorist Attack Network loaded into Neo4j. It looked like this:

There's a couple things that annoyed be about this graph:

1. First, the relationships are all "bidirectional", which really clutters the visualisation. In Neo4j, relationships are always directed, which kind of makes it awkward to store these bi-directional relationships like this. 
2. Of course, this graph was originally made by De Standaard newspaper in Flanders, Belgium, so therefore it was created in Dutch. A couple of the key concepts though (type of node, status of the node) would be easily and meaningfully translated for you to have any fun with the dataset.
3. The graph was not "labeled", and therefore lacked some essential structural elements that would allow for fun manipulation in the Neo4j Browser. 
4. The relationships did not really say anything about the type of relationship. 

Let's tackle these one by one.

Read more »

Exploring the Paris Terrorist Attack Network - part 1/3

November 13th, 2015 - A day to remember

Just over two weeks ago, we remembered the sad anniversary of one of the most atrocious and vile terrorist attachs that our generation has seen. It's easy to forget many things in our daily rat race, but I don't think I will easily forget this video, which was all over the internet hours/days after the attack on the Bataclan concert hall in Paris:

All it takes is a drop of empathy and humanity to understand the horror that these victims went through. The sound of the one person shouting "Oscar .... Oscar... Oscar..." just keeps on ringing through my head.

Read more »