Graphistania 2.0 - The one with all the GraphStuff

Yes! Here's another great Neo4j podcast episode for you. I hope you will enjoy it -  just as much as I enjoyed recording it with Stefan.

Note that I have put all the interesting links together at the very bottom of the post. They all come from the Twin4j newsletter - to which you should all subscribe, obviously!

Graphistania · Graphistania v2e14

Here's the transcript of our conversation:

RVB: 00:00:44.353 Hello, everyone. My name is Rik, Rik Van Bruggen from Neo4j, and yes, it's that time again. We are recording another Graphistania Neo4j podcast. And on the other side of this Zoom call is my dear partner in crime, Stefan, Stefan Wendin. How are you, man?

SW: 00:01:05.215 Always good. Always good meeting up, doing this with you, Rik. It's one of the favourites of the month. And I don't know, what can be better, talking about graphs with your best friend Rik in a sunny southern part of Sweden? Amazing. So good to go.

RVB: 00:01:22.239 Good to go. Fantastic. Great to have you here. And actually, we need to specify one thing, right, before we move on to the real topic of our podcast recording.

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Graphistania 2.0 - Episode 10 - This Month in Neo4j

Hi everyone

Hope you are all well, keeping safe, and finding some time to relax and enjoy life in this wonderful rollercoaster that is 2020. Think of it this way - we will never forget this ride, EVAH! 

As you can imagine, things have been evolving at warp speed in the wonderful world of graphs as well. So me and my partner in crime Stefan had another chat about all the things we have seen pop up, mostly through the awesome This Week in Neo4j (Twin4J) newsletter. Here's the chat we recorded:

Graphistania · Graphistania 2.0 - Episode 10

Here's the transcript of our conversation:

RVB:00:00:01.448 Hello, everyone. My name is Rik, Rik Van Bruggen from Neo4j, and here I am again recording another episode of our Graphistania Neo4j podcast. Wonderful time of the day to start with this type of conversation because I have my dear friend, Stefan, on the other side of this call. Hi, Stefan. How are you?

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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.

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Graphistania 2.0 - Episode 7 - The one after the Covid-19 lockdown

Yes! We were able to record and publish another episode of our Graphistania podcast. It's been an amazing and turbulent couple of months - but before the summer holiday season really takes off we wanted to get this to you.

Wishing you a fantastic and relaxing time - and in the mean time enjoy this episode!

Graphistania · Graphistania 2.0 - episode 7

Here's the transcript of our conversation:

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Graphistania 2.0 - Episode 6 - The One with the CovidGraph

So, when I started working with Graphs in 2012, one of the first community use cases that I encountered was all about biotech. I met a few people from the University of Ghent, who were working on some amazing protein interaction networks - and it was fascinating. Over the years, we have done quite a few activities on this, and we have kind of built a nice life sciences and healthcare community around Neo4j. Some amazing work is being done there.

One of the most amazing cases out there, has been the use case of the German Center for Diabetes Research, who have been scouring the scientific universe for ways of finding cures against diabetes. Look at this brief video or read this article to know more about it:

Why am I telling you this? Well, with the global Covid-19 pandemic sweeping around the globe, and many of us being affected in small or big ways, our Neo4j Graph Community has been doing the most interesting things to try and apply the "power of the graph" to this complex and intricate problem. Take a look at covidgraph.org for their work. When I learned about it, I immediately thought about talking to some of the "chief instigators" and inviting them for a podcast interview - which we made happen at record speed :) ...

So here it is: a chat about Covid-19, and about how graphs will help us make sense of the data. Let's hope it proves to be useful.
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Graphistania 2.0 - Episode 5 - This Month in Neo4j

Friends.

These are interesting times. These are difficult times, but we can deal with it together, as a community, as a graph. So that's why we were super happy that, just as Belgium was going into lockdown last week, we were able to record another Graphistania podcast episode for you, talking about the world in general, but also covering some of the amazing graph use cases that drifted over our screens in the past month, in the This Week in Neo4j (TWIN4J) newsletter.

There were actually many things to talk about, in terms of fascinating graph use cases, and I will highlight only the most striking ones here.

Our friends at Kineviz did some really interesting and timely work on  COVID-19 temporal and spatial data visualization. This stuff is really important to understand, as pandemic spreads clearly follow graph patterns. Read Connected if you are not convinced. 

Worth highlighting: Bloodhound: Windows network penetration testing with Neo4j, had a new release that you might want to take a look at. If you are not familiar with Bloodhound yet, you may also want to check out my interview with the Bloodhound crew on this podcast a while back. 

We published this fun little thing called a Neo4j Treasure Map - check it out! 

Finally - we also have a a Winegraph! It's a great example of importing data from the web using Norconex.  

Some interesting stuff on using Neo4j for Gene ID mapping: take a look! 

Another examle of enriching graphs with Wikidata, from the one and only Mark Needham: look at Mark's blog over here! 

Don't forget: we Introduced the Neo4j Graph Data Science plugin with examples from the "Graph Algorithms" book. 

A really interesting tweet about a visualisation of the US Supreme court as a graph db... Would love to see more like that. 

And for some fun: Pokégraph: Gotta Graph 'Em All! 

Some important stuff: we did a great 4.0 webinar that is giving you a lot of info on what to expect in the new version of Neo4j.  

There was a great update to NeoMap: Visualizing shortest paths with neomap ≥ 0.4.0 and the Neo4j Graph Data Science plugin.

Those were the most important ones. So let's talk about these now - I am sure there's a lot of cool stuff here fore everyone!
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Graphistania 2.0 - Episode 4 - This Month in Neo4j

Yey! My friend StefanW and I got round to recording another Graphistania episode, episode 4 already - time flies when you are having fun! This month, again, we have so much great content popping up in the This Week in Neo4j (Twin4j) newsletter, that we could probably fill a few hours talking about it. So in the podcast, we will only talk about a handful - covering things like

• the great momentum that we have in the Neo4jcommunity! Take a look at initiatives like Global Graph Celebration Day, and listen to Neo4j's mad scientist Michael Hunger on graphs, databases and relationships on a different podcast.
• the start of the Neo4j Graphtour, for the 3rd year already, in Amsterdam. This year this actually coincided with the launch of Neo4j 4.0 - one of the best releases of Neo4j that I have personally ever witnessed. I have actually been writing a bit about this myself - read about how I how I child-proofed my beergraph with fine-grained security and how I did something similar by adding security to a fraud investigation graph. There's other articles as well, like When and how to implement Sharding in Neo4j 4.0.
• Various personal graphs projects, like Mark's Australian Open graph and the QuickGraph #3 on Itsu Allergens. I love how Mark summarized it: most of analysis could be done in relational, but "Things got more interesting in the last section where we did set analysis. I found having the data in a graph structure made was helpful for answering these questions, especially when we were looking for the non existence of a relationship."
• a number of Health related articles, like that visualisation of the data from the Personal Genome Project, or the Google project wiuth the “Largest Ever” Map of Brain Connectivity
• And then of course there were various "Other" posts that we really liked, like how to be Working With Spatial Data In Neo4j GraphQL In The Cloud, and the post about Aaia - AWS Identity And Access Management Visualizer And Anomaly Finder. Last but not least, you should also take a look at the Graphaware Hume platform - with an excellent powerful demo recording over here.

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Graphistania 2.0 - Episode 3 - This Month in Neo4j

Happy new year everyone - although it actually seem like the holidays are already very far behind us! But great times were had, at least in my family, and so I feel super energised to make 2020 another great start to a decade of graphs :) ... Here's to that!

It also means that we are continuing to see all these awesome community stories pop up left right and center in the Neo4j "This week in Neo4j" developer newsletter. And so on our Graphistania podcast, we are going to continue talking about these on a monthly basis. So that's what we're doing - and I have again invited my friend and colleague Stefan Wendin to join me.

From the newsletter, we always select a few stories that we think will be more interesting and/or meaningful to discuss. This month, we found a number of them, and the interesting thing was that the graph-stories seemed to play at very different scales... The Personal, Corporate, and Society levels. Here are some of the ones we liked:

At the Personal scale

• Alex Woolford - Network analysis with Neo4j / Kafka / Zeek. Alex also has this really cool video on "Event driven parenting": if your kid is getting bad grades, that event will lead to no more PS4 network access :) ... Bit harsh - but still!

At the Corporate scale

• IT centric example: Managing VMware infrastructure with Neo4j - great example of how to understand infrastructure dependencies in an IT environment with graphs.
• Business centric examples: Analysing online customer journeys in 3D and Using Augmented Reality to create an indoor navigation system with VIROREACT. This also reminded me of these examples of using Neo4j to build digital twins for wind farms and digital twins for subsea gas. 
• Maybe one more - very specific to the graph world and totally optional: Keeping track of graph changes using temporal versioning. This references: Neo4j Versioner - they recently released version 2. I really like that. 

At the Society scale, we saw some amazing posts:

• State-Sponsored Twitter Accounts Pushing For War With Iran
• Visualizing Breast Cancer Data with Neo4j and GraphXR 

So I think you agree that we had plenty of stuff to talk about. Let's get into that!

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Graphistania 2.0 - Episode 1 - This Month in Neo4j

Hello everyone!

it has been deadly quiet on this page, hasn't it. That's really oh so true, and I am / was not happy with that. This blog, the podcast, and everything around has always been my humble contribution to our awesome Neo4j community, and in the past 6+ month or so, I have not been doing my part. Sorry for that. Lots of excuses that I will not bore you with, but I am going to try to do better.

Part of the reason for the silence was of course that I thought that the podcast formula (in which I always asked for the three same basic things: who are you, why graphs, what's coming in the future) had kind of run its course. 100+ episodes had given me lots of fantastic conversations, but it was time to move on. I needed a new formula.

A couple of weeks ago, while doing absolutely NOTHING graph related - unless you want to imagine a graph of a bathroom, a shower, soap, and yours truly - I came up with an idea. What if we did episodes about all of the cool, innovative things that are popping up in our community on a daily basis? Sure. But where could I find those? Well, on the Neo4j developer relations "This week in Neo4j" (TWIN4J) newsletter probably, right! But who would I talk to that about? Well... this is where I found a great partner in crime. I thought about one of my most creative colleagues, someone who is paid to be creative and is really good at it - and came up with noone other than Stefan Wendin. Stefan leads our Innovation Labs in EMEA, and has presented on that topic extensively in the past.

Neo4j Innovation Lab, Stefan Wendin, Neo4j from Neo4j

So we have lots of innovation. We have someone who KNOWS a lot about innovation. So let's then have a chat about some of these innovative graph database applications, shall we? Here goes.

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