Alright, here's a project that has been a long time in the making. As you may know from reading this blog, I have had an interest, a fascination even, with all the wonderful use cases that the graph ecosystem holds. To me, it continues to be such a fantastic thing to be able to work in - graphs are everywhere, and more and more people are waking up to the fact that they really should look at their data as a network, and leverage the important relationships that are often hidden from plain sight.
One of these use cases that has been intriguing me for years, literally, is clickstream analysis. In fact, I wrote about this already back in 2013 - amazing when you think about it. Other people, like our friends at Snowplow Analytics, have been writing about this as well, but somehow the use case has been snowed under a little maybe. With this blogpost, I want to illustrate why I think that this particular use case - which is really a typical pathfinding application when you think about it, is such a great fit for Neo4j.
A real dataset: Wikipedia clickstream data
This crazy journey obviously started with finding a good dataset. There's quite a few of them around, but I wanted to find something realistic, representative and useful. So after some digging around I found the fantastic site of Wikimedia, where they actually structurally make all aggregated clickstream data of Wikipedia's pages available. You can just download them from this their website, and grab the latest zipped up files. In this blogpost, I worked with the February 2021 data, which you can find over here.
When you dowload that fine, you will find a tab-separated text file that includes the following 4 fields
prev: the previous page that the navigation came from
curr: the current page that the navigation came into
type: the description of the type of navigation that was occuring. There's different possible values here
link: a regular link between pages
external: a link from an external page to the current page
other: a different type - which can occur if people try to hide their navigation patterns
n: the number of occurrences of the (prev, curr) pair - so the number of times this navigation took place.
So this is the dataset that we want to import into Neo4j. But - we need to do one tiny little fix: we need to escape the “ characters that are in the dataset. To do that, I just opened the file in a text editor (eg. TextEdit on OSX) and did a simple Find/Replace of " with "". This take care of it.
In the previous blogpost, I showed you how easy it was to import data into Neo4j from the official Wikipedia clickstream data. I am sure you would agree that it was surprisingly easy to import a reasonably sized dataset like that, within a very reasonable timeframe. So now we can have some fun with that data, and start applying some graph queries to it. All of these queries are also on github, of course, and you can play around with them there as well.
So let's take a look at some of these queries.
Some data profiling and exploration
Here's a very simple query to give you a feel for the dataset:
match (n)-[r:LINKS_TO]->(m)
return distinct r.type, count(r);
match (n) return count(n);
The results are telling:
And so now we can start taking a look at some specific links between pages. One place to investigate would be the Neo4j wikipedia page. Here's a query that looks at the source pages that are generating traffic into the Neo4j wikipedia page:
How easy it is to import the Wikipedia Clickstream data into Neo4j. You can find that post over here.
How you can start doing some interesting querying on that data, with some very simple but powerful Cypher querying. You can find that post over here.
In this final blogpost I want to try to add two more things to the mix. First, I want to see if I can do some useful "Graph Data Science" on this dataset. I will be using the Neo4j Graph Data Science Library for this, as well as the Neuler Graph App that plugs into the Neo4j Desktop. Next, I will be exposing some of the results of these Graph Data Science calculations in Neo4j's interactive graph exploration tool, Neo4j Bloom. So let's do that.
Installing/Running the Graph Data Science Library
Thanks to Neo4j's plugin architecture, and the Neo4j Desktop tool around that, it is now super easy to install and run the Graph Data Science Libary - it installs in a few clicks and that you are off to the races:
This weekend marked the 1 year anniversary of the "Covid era" - the time when many of us have been hunkered down at home, or close to home at least, to deal with the raging pandemic. It has been a strange couple of months, and while I personally have been able to deal with it quite comfortably, I must say that my heart has been going out to all the friends and families that have had a far worse time with this. I personally got to experience it first hand in the first couple of months of 2021, loosing a very dear friend to the virus and its awful disease, and will not easily forget this period of our lives.
But we do want to keep the fantastic drive and atmosphere of our Neo4j community up - it would be a terrible shame if we lost that, too, to the virus. So that's why me and Stefan are going to continue making these podcast episodes, at least for the foreseeable future. Not in the least because they are a ton of fun to make :) ...
So here's our latest chat. We have found a true treasure trove of great use cases and such in the Twin4j newsletter, which we will try to highlight:
RVB: 00:00:00.768 Hello, everyone. My name is Rik, Rik Van Bruggen from Neo4j, and yep, it's that time again. Yippee! Yeah. We have another podcast recording day, and for that, I have my dear friend Stefan on the other side of this Zoom call. Hey, Stefan.
SW: 00:00:18.130 Hello, Rik. Nice to be back here with you.
RVB: 00:00:20.830 Hey, there.
SW: 00:00:21.733 Coming back from a week of vacation, so very nice to be back, and what better way to get your graph mind up and running than to hang out with you here in this lovely podcast?
RVB: 00:00:33.018 I hope so too. Thanks for being here, and I hope you had a good holiday. And it's been two months, Stefan, so we really need to get our act together. It's been a very busy--
SW: 00:00:43.185 Holy crap.
RVB: 00:00:44.057 --couple of months, but. We try to do these things once a month, but that didn't work in February, and so we've got a lot to talk about, actually. And maybe I'll just kind of frame it for you. I went through all of the Twin4j this week, the Neo4j newsletters over the past couple of weeks, and I found some really interesting themes. And maybe we can talk about those for a bit. There's three of them. Is that okay?
SW: 00:01:16.179 Yeah, yeah. Let's go. I think that should be super fun.
RVB: 00:01:20.885 Yeah. So the first one I wanted to talk about is, basically, use cases. I mean, we see this all the time in our community, really, right? That there's these unbelievable interesting use cases popping up. There's a couple of them that popped up in the newsletters. The first one is actually dear to my heart. It's something that I started working on back in 2012 when I first joined Neo4j. It's protein interaction networks. Have you taken a look at that one?
SW: 00:01:50.023 Yeah. That was an amazing one. As always with those kind of things, when there is-- this was written by Tomaz, right? So I started--
RVB: 00:02:01.558 Tomaz, [crosstalk].
SW: 00:02:02.277 --reading the article, but then halfway through the article, I was like, "Oh, but I better just try it out." That's how I learn. So I ended up running this, and it is so neat that this is, in some sort of way, so accessible. I think for me, that is super cool in that. So I find it extremely interesting and also because of the simplicity of it and how complex it is, even if it's just such a simple thing as a protein that interacts with another protein, basically, at the foundation, and it's still amazing. I think it's kind of mind boggling in that sense, so.
RVB: 00:02:44.678 A little story from my side: when I first started working with Neo4j, we did some work with the University of Ghent here in Belgium, and they were working on a topic called metaproteomics, which is exactly this, interactions of proteins. And they struck a nerve with me because one of their most important research customers was, of course - drumroll - a brewery.
SW: 00:03:13.135 Of course. I was wondering, "Where is this going to go?"
RVB: 00:03:17.022 Yes.
SW: 00:03:17.797 There it was. Brewery time again.
RVB: 00:03:18.825 There it is. Yeah.
SW: 00:03:20.664 There it is.
RVB: 00:03:21.182 It was a beer brewery, and they were basically saying yeasts that are being added to brewing systems, they create these protein interactions, and if you better manage those protein interactions, you can actually influence the brewing and the taste of the brew by doing so. So that was an interesting one. I had a good time exploring that. There was another one, Stefan, around asset management. This is a very well-known one as well, right? Things like configuration management databases, building information management. It's all about managing assets, isn't it? It's a very networked problem.
SW: 00:04:06.005 Yeah, yeah. And also, this is one of the use cases that seems to pop up more and more often in customer or prospect interactions, I think, so I think it's going to be very helpful for people. So go check it out if you are interested in that. I think that would be very neat to do that.
RVB: 00:04:29.195 But I know you want to skip to the third one that we had [crosstalk].
SW: 00:04:32.095 Yeah, the big one. This is what I'm kind of waiting for, like, "How can we get to this point faster?" Ha ha!
RVB: 00:04:37.534 Yeah. "How can we get to that third point faster?" which is, of course, the use case of getting to Mars and NASA. It was all over the news in the past couple of weeks, obviously, but yeah, that story of how David Meza from NASA-- he's the - how do you call it? - chief knowledge management architect or something like that with NASA, and he worked on that Lessons Learned database in Neo4j. Super cool, right? It's so good.
SW: 00:05:12.489 Yeah. It's super good. I think the use case is good. The interview is also great. David is also very relaxed, I think, also. Ashley - or what is the name of the girl interviewing? - is also doing a great job. There's very good chemistry in there, really enjoyed it. And again, of course, anyone that was dreaming about going to space as a kid, imagine working with such a thing. I mean, it can't get better. This is the moment when you go to work, and you go, "Holy crap. I'm so proud now." But I think it's an interesting thing on how much this actually speed up time for them, right? How much is saved not only time, in that sense, but also taxpayers' money, right?
RVB: 00:05:59.053 Of course.
SW: 00:05:59.211 I think that's what I keep coming back to in talking about use cases. So you can do a lot of things with a lot of technologies, right? So very often, people ask me, "How can I use Neo?" Right? But then I say, "You can do it for this, but you can, of course, do this with your old technology, in theory. However, if that theory takes you two years, maybe you can't really do it in practice." So I keep coming back to think about that, and I think this is such a good showcaser on that. It's a great YouTube clip here, so for those that have a hard time reading or just want to listen while-- I was saying commuting to work. Apparently, commuting to your working room should be better now, in these times. But I really enjoyed it. Happy to see it, so yeah, hope you like it as well.
RVB: 00:06:49.604 Cool. Yeah. It was super nice. And there's another, I mean, theme to the newsletters in the past couple of months. I've seen so many-- it's kind of like a use case, but it's also a technology foundation of people that are using graphs in combination with natural language processing, right? I saw a number of posts from Jesús, our colleague, who was talking about RDF-related work, WordNet, those types of things, but there's also people that are doing really interesting work on extracting new knowledge from existing documents, right? Were you able to make any sense of that?
SW: 00:07:39.354 Yeah. And I think it's like this is also one of those kind of super untapped-- and I think it's also a perfect bridge from NASA, right? Because literally, that was what they were doing. They had the answers; they just couldn't see it, right? So it's a classical, "You can't see the forest because of all the trees," right? So I think that is really interesting. And I think also, there is a great post about-- I think it was called From Text to Knowledge: The Information Extraction Pipeline or something, basically where Tomaz then explained why he see a combination of NLP and graphs as one path to explainable AI, right? And I think this is also one of those topics that are super important from a lot of things to kind of understand but also compliance and a lot of things, right? So I think this is also one of those kind of areas, use cases, or whatever you want to call it that literally are exploding on all different kind of verticals, you may almost use as a word there. But yeah, I think that, again, our--
RVB: 00:08:44.103 Yeah. Well, it's been very popular in domains where there's a lot of documentation, right? So academics, pharmaceuticals, patterns, legal texts, all those things have been really a great showcase for this type of work, I think.
SW: 00:09:04.354 Yeah. No, but as you're saying, I can see anything from academia, patterns-- I mean, I don't know how many of these kind of works that we have done with prospects and really kind of tapping into this kind of super kind of deep knowledge, but you can't see the new perspective because it is just a lot of deep silos, right? So in that sense, it's super graphy, and I think when people start to see it, this is also where they get so excited so were almost screaming, "Take my money," and I was like, "Calm down. Behave good. What is it that you're thinking of answering, or what is the thing that would help you," right? It doesn't have to be the money query, but just don't throw technology at the problem. So be mindful of what you want. I mean, we can see it a lot. I think one of the interesting parts is also looking upon the entire web, scraping information and making sense of it and treating that as a kind of a knowledge grab itself. It's also one of a neat couple of projects that I'm working on personally. Yeah. So there's a lot of funny things to do with the NLP and knowledge graphing combination, I think.
RVB: 00:10:19.330 Yep, totally. Well, what strikes me there-- and this is a perfect segue to our third theme. What strikes me is that it's becoming so much easier to do this, right? So NLP a couple of years ago, that was just so exotic and difficult to use. You basically had to have some kind of a computer science degree or a PhD to be able to use it, but these days, the tools that we have to implement some of these techniques are super accessible. I mean, even a lost sales guy like me can use it. Do you know what I mean? It's pretty usable, even in its basic form. So I wanted to talk about some of the really interesting tools that we see emerging in our community. The one that I was so happy about, to finally see it fully released, is the Arrows app. I think you've used it for a long time already when it was still in an alpha or beta stage, and now it's--
SW: 00:11:26.893 Exactly.
RVB: 00:11:27.278 --actually been released. Alistair Jones' pet project is now finally out there in the wild. Great, though, right? I mean, really great.
SW: 00:11:37.420 Yeah. No, but I think it's so useful in so many ways, of course, for graph modelling, where it was intended, right? And I have a couple of memories working with a lot of C-level people trying to help them understand the power of connected data and so on. So they're not going to write any code, but what we tend to do is do some modelling practices and basic cipher, and for that, I use Arrows. And one of the constant feedback that I get because of the simplicity of the tool and how it naturally kind of lends your thinking to this kind of graph thinking idea is that, every single one of these sessions, these CEOs, COOs are coming back to me like, "Oh, this is a really good way of thinking of the business, the different domain, and how it's connected. It has given me tons of new ideas." So in that sense, that kind of doubled down as a ideation kind of tool almost, if it makes sense, but I think that's such a cool kind of thing, right? If you're going to build an app or if you have a business logic or anything, that really helps you to kind of map it out in that sense. So it's also kind of neat to see that and to see those people, also, stepping into the graph arena. But yeah.
RVB: 00:12:53.804 Yep. That frame also. Yeah. So Arrows is one of those really amazing tools, but there's other things that are coming up, right? We've all known about the GRANDstack, the development framework that's been around for quite some time. A new release for that and new features, capabilities there, and some examples, also, for people to use and to abuse, I would say.
SW: 00:13:18.057 Use and abuse. That's a perfect way to do it.
RVB: 00:13:19.407 Use and abuse, yeah.
SW: 00:13:21.935 Just dive in there and try.
RVB: 00:13:22.283 And then another one that I wanted to mention was I've really enjoyed using this tool that Niels created called NeoDash. It's a graph app that plugs into the Neo4j browser and allows you to put together dashboards on top of Neo4j. Really no-code development, that type of thing, super easy to use. I was very impressed by that, how accessible it's made everything.
SW: 00:13:52.996 Yeah. And I think that's such a great part because I think just the ability to do something without that no code. Of course, that is in the topic with the cloud itself, one of those kind of things that you can really see how accessible these are. But seeing people with no previous knowledge just trying and fiddling around there, they kind of stumble upon the solution almost. That simple. I think the NeoDash is such a great kind of application for just exploring or visualising the data that you have in a graph that you normally would not use. So we tend to try it out with a lot of the nontechnical people when we work, and it works like a charm every single time. There is literally almost no studying kind of to get started, so I again encourage you, as with all articles, use and abuse, right? Dive in, try around because actually, you're going to get kind of far by just doing that. And that is, I think, a common theme for all of these. You can really see how this whole paradigm of connected data is changing, which is, of course, super cool.
RVB: 00:15:17.502 Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, so many other things to talk about. What we'll do is when we get to the blog post created together with this recording, we'll also put all the links to the amazing Twin4j newsletter items and the blog posts and everything all together, and then people can have a look, have a play, use and abuse, and that should set them on their path for even more graph adoption, right? So that's the [crosstalk] idea.
SW: 00:15:50.313 Even more graph adoption. Yeah. And I'm also going to squeeze in a last one because we also had the GDS 1.5 release, right? And there's a great piece on it from Amy and Alicia, two of my most inspiring colleagues. They have taught me a lot of things and are super nice as well. So it's about the new supervised machine learning workflows in Neo4j, so imagine that being even accessible to just try. I can't even think of this. If I would have guessed this five years ago, I'd be like, "Nah, that's not going to happen."
RVB: 00:16:29.543 It was impossible. Yeah, exactly.
SW: 00:16:31.365 "That's impossible. You can't do that on your computer at home in your sofa." But I think that's so cool. So that's a great article by Amy and Alicia; go check it out as well. I'm going to push that in there, but we're going to, of course, post the links, as I said.
RVB: 00:16:48.591 We will, for sure. Well, Stefan, thank you so much for taking the time running through this with me and making a little bit more sense out of it. It was great talking to you. You know that we want to keep these things shortish, at least, so we're going to wrap it up for now, and we're going to try to have this one published soon and then do another one in April, right? We should [crosstalk].
SW: 00:17:14.412 Yes, of course, 1st of April. I will record it from my new podcast studio in the barn in [inaudible] in southern Sweden.
RVB: 00:17:22.097 Ooh.
SW: 00:17:23.410 Ooh, yes. And then--
RVB: 00:17:25.195 I look forward to that one.
SW: 00:17:26.657 --as soon as we get to travel, this is a standing invitation for you to come join me and also for any of our listeners. Bear in mind--
RVB: 00:17:37.641 Absolutely [crosstalk].
SW: 00:17:37.964 --COVID restrictions has to be better before that, so I am not encouraging any anti-vaccine behaviour here, but as soon as we are allowed to travel, come join us. It's going to be a great talk about graphs.
RVB: 00:17:51.294 Fantastic. Thank you, Stefan. It was great talking to you, and I'll talk to you soon.
SW: 00:17:55.905 Likewise. Bye.
RVB: 00:17:57.591 Bye.
Hope you enjoyed that as much as we did. If you have any comments or questions, just reach out!
Last year I was able to spend some time thinking and writing about Contact Tracing, especially since it should probably be a very important part of any kind of system that allows us to deal with pandemics like the Covid-19 pandemic. You kan find some of these articles on this blog if you are interested. This is still as relevant as ever, but seems to have been a more difficult thing to implement practically in a free and privacy-sensitive society like ours (see this research and this article for some thoughts on this). Nevertheless it seems relevant still, as the Canton of Geneva has demonstrated.
In this article I wanted to share a very short little piece of work that I did together with my colleagues on the part that ACTIONS contact tracing activities. What do we ACTUALLY DO when we find a person that is at risk? What alarms should go off? Who should get notified? Where should we be looking for our next potential patient?
This, I think, is something that we could solve with a "database trigger". This is a systematic way of always reacting to events in the database in a consistent and predictable way. It has been demonstrated a number of times before - I really liked David's way of explaining it in his article on data loading/streaming with Neo4j's triggers. David describes it well:
What’s a Trigger?
If you haven’t worked with triggers before, a trigger is a database method of running some action whenever an event happens. You can use them to make the database react to events, rather than passively accept data, which makes them a good fit for streaming data, which is a set of events coming in.
Triggers need two pieces:
A trigger condition (which event should the trigger fire on?)
A trigger action (what to do when the trigger fires?)
So what I want to take you through here is just to take the contact tracing dataset, and show you how easy even a salesperson-lost-in-cypherspace like myself could make it work. So here goes.
Installing and preparing
So the first thing we need to do is to create new database in Neo4j Desktop. Once installed, we should install the APOC plugin, which should be directly available in Neo4j Desktop's "plugins" section. The trigger functionality that we will be using us actually part of the APOC library, and you can find documentation on them over here.
In order to generate the dataset, I will use the Faker plugin again. See the previous blogpost for more on that, but installing that is actually really easy. First we need to download the latest release from github, unzip that file into plugins directory of your freshly baked server, and then manually do a small piece of restructuring in the file structure:
put neo4jFaker-0.9.1.jar in plugins directory
and put ddgres directory in plugins directory.
delete all other directories
Once that done, we need to edit the neo4j.conf file so that the faker library will actually be allowed to run inside your Neo4j server. You do that by adding
dbms.security.procedures.unrestricted=fkr.*
to neo4j.conf. Easy. The file structure should look like this:
And the neo4j.conf should have a line like this.
Once that's done the last change is to allow the apoc triggers to run by adding
apoc.trigger.enabled=true
to neo4j.conf as well.
Generating the dataset
First thing after starting the database is to fire up the Neo4j Browser, and check if faker library functions are active. That's easy:
call dbms.functions() yield name
with name
where name starts with "fkr"
return *
If it returns with a list of functions, then we are good to go.
Next we just need to run two queries to create the dataset: 5000 persons with 15000 MEETS relationships.
foreach (i in range(1,5000) |
create (p:Person { id : i })
set p += fkr.person('1940-01-01','2020-05-15')
set p.healthstatus = fkr.stringElement("Sick,Healthy")
set p.confirmedtime = datetime()-duration("P"+toInteger(round(rand()*100))+"DT"+toInteger(round(rand()*10))+"H")
set p.birthDate = datetime(p.birthDate)
set p.addresslocation = point({x: toFloat(51.210197+rand()/100), y: toFloat(4.402771+rand()/100)})
set p.name = p.fullName
remove p.fullName
);
and then
match (p:Person)
with collect(p) as persons
call fkr.createRelations(persons, "MEETS" , persons, "1-n") yield relationships as meetsRelations1
call fkr.createRelations(persons, "MEETS" , persons, "1-n") yield relationships as meetsRelations2
call fkr.createRelations(persons, "MEETS" , persons, "1-n") yield relationships as meetsRelations3
with meetsRelations1+meetsRelations2+meetsRelations3 as meetsRelations
unwind meetsRelations as meetsRelation
set meetsRelation.starttime = datetime()-duration("P"+toInteger(round(rand()*100))+"DT"+toInteger(round(rand()*10))+"H")
set meetsRelation.endtime = meetsRelation.starttime + duration("PT"+toInteger(round(rand()*10))+"H"+toInteger(round(rand()*60))+"M")
set meetsRelation.meettime = duration.between(meetsRelation.starttime,meetsRelation.endtime)
set meetsRelation.meettimeinseconds=meetsRelation.meettime.seconds;
That finishes in seconds.
And then we end up with a very simple graph data model:
Now we can start asking ourselves how we can take these automatically triggered actions based on database triggers. So let's explore that.
Working with triggers
As mentioned above, you can find the documentation for the trigger procedures and functions over here. Once the configuration flag is set (apoc.trigger.enabled=true) in neo4j.conf, we can add the triggers to the database, and start testing them. so let's add them first.
Adding two triggers
You will find that there are different types of triggers that you can add. I will explore two types in this post:
a trigger that will fire as soon as a LABEL is added to a node in the database.
a trigger that will fire as soon as a property is set in the database.
The structure and process of adding the triggers is very similar and simple. Let's walk through it.
First we will be adding the CHANGE LABEL trigger to the database - we call this trigger "highriskpersonadded":
CALL apoc.trigger.add(
'highriskpersonadded',
'UNWIND apoc.trigger.nodesByLabel($assignedLabels,"HighRiskPerson") AS n MATCH (n)-[:MEETS]-(p:Person) set p:ElevatedRiskPerson'
,{phase:'after'}
)
Next we are adding a CHANGE PROPERTY trigger to the database - we call this trigger "healthstatuspropertychangedtosick":
CALL apoc.trigger.add(
'healthstatuspropertychangedtosick',
'UNWIND apoc.trigger.propertiesByKey($assignedNodeProperties,"healthstatus") AS prop
with prop.node as n
MATCH (n)-[:MEETS]-(p:Person) where n.healthstatus = "Sick"
set p:MuchElevatedRiskPerson'
,{phase:'after'}
)
Once these have been added to the database, we can start working with them, and test them out.
Managing the triggers
There's a number of procedures that allow us to see which triggers have been added, and which are active:
Listing the trigger:
call apoc.trigger.list()
There's another procedure for removing the trigger:
call apoc.trigger.remove('<name of trigger>')
And one for pausing the trigger:
call apoc.trigger.pause('<name of trigger>')
Or resuming the trigger:
call apoc.trigger.resume('<name of trigger>')
But now, of course, we want to see what happens to our database when the triggers start firing. Let's explore that.
Triggering the triggers
The first thing that we will do is we will write a cypher query that will trigger the CHANGE LABEL trigger. We do that by selecting one person and assigning the "HighRiskPerson" label to that node:
match (p:Person {healthstatus:"Healthy"})
with p
limit 1
set p:HighRiskPerson;
This quasi immediately completes:
And then we immediately see that our Neo4j browser reacts by highlighting the fact that some new labels have been added to the database.
And then we run a quick query to see that indeed, the HighRiskPerson node has been connected to other nodes that have the ElevatedRiskPerson label:
So our first trigger is clearly working. Let's try the other one.
We will now triggering the CHANGE PROPERTY trigger by at the same time set a new label (VeryHighRiskPerson) and setting the healthstatus property to "Sick".
match (p:Person {healthstatus:"Healthy"})
with p
limit 1
set p:VeryHighRiskPerson
set p.healthstatus = "Sick";
That finishes immediately, of course.
And next thing we know, we also see that the VeryHighRiskPerson and MuchElevatedRiskPerson labels have been added:
So that all seems to have worked. This really allows for much more automated actions on the database, which could be extremely useful in a sensitive use case like Contact Tracing - but I could equally see how this would be super useful for use cases like Fraud Detection or something similar.
Hope this useful for everyone. All the code in this example has been published on github, of course. If you have any feedback, please reach out.
A VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR, everyone! I hope 2021 will beat all of your professional and personal expectations, and OMG aren't we all hoping that we can see eachother in person a bit more this year. Let's make that happen, when it's safe to do so. For now, we will connect with each other remotely, among other things through this page and this... podcast.
Here's a great episode for you. As always, we actually based our conversation on the awesome TWIN4J developer newsletter, which has some fantastic stories in there almost every week - definitely recommend that you subscribe to that one. Our summary of some of the posts is in this document, and here's the recording of our conversation:
RVB: 00:00:20.848 Hello, everyone. My name is Rik, Rik Van Bruggen from Neo4j. And happy new year. Happy new year to everyone, and welcome to another episode our Graphistania podcast. So happy to be here again after this crazy year it was, 2020. And we are going to continue with the good thing that we started last year, which is I have my dear friend and colleague, Stefan, with me on this recording. Hi, Stefan.
SW: 00:00:56.121 Hello, Rik, and hello every single one of you out there in this completely new year, which is going to be, of course, completely different and not anything like the year before. Let's see how that turns out. We all know what's going to happen or what is already happening. But it can just be as good as we make it. So this is what I like doing, this thing with you, because it's really fun and inspiring, and I hope people feel the same.
RVB: 00:01:23.810 Yeah. Same here. Yeah. Thanks for being there. And, as usual, we have a lot to talk about, and we'll probably need to keep an eye on the clock here a little bit. But yeah, there's been so many great things, again, in the graph community that have been popping up. So many great examples that keep coming out in the This Week in Neo4j newsletter, but also everywhere on the community website. It's kind of amazing. I've got a couple of ideas to talk about. Why don't we run through those? Is that okay for you?
SW: 00:02:03.521 Yeah. That would be lovely. And, again, what better way to get your kind of lazy Christmas holiday brain to start than to dive straight in? So yeah.
RVB: 00:02:13.998 Exactly. Yeah.
SW: 00:02:15.499 Any one of those you're thinking of that stand out?
RVB: 00:02:18.754 Well, when I was going through the This Week in Neo4j newsletters, which is what I typically do in preparing for these podcasts, to just kind of see what's happening, right, what struck me is that there's a number of super, super interesting discussions and cases that are all about knowledge creation, how graphs can help you with not just knowledge management, so to speak, and structuring knowledge but really kind of creating new knowledge. People talk about machine learning and AI these days all the time. But it's amazing how things like this-- there was an article about the brain, which is one of those knowledge management tools that use graphs. Or some of the articles that Jesús wrote around multilingual taxonomies or the ArXiv connections. I mean, all of these use cases, they're all about, leveraging existing data, structuring it as a graph, and then using that to create new knowledge, which is fascinating in my book. What do you think about that?
SW: 00:03:39.777 Or maybe it's even like-- it comes, for me, from this fascination of, as you said, everybody running towards the latest technology. But what they do tend to forget is that there's a lot of [barriers?] just underneath their feet, right? But they can't see it. So all of that knowledge is there, however, they cannot see it because it's not connected, right? And I think that's the beauty of the graph and the way you can work with it to allow you to see the things that you already had answers to or the things that you didn't even know that you wanted to know, as I always say. And I think that is also coming back to a little bit on the way I think about strategy and behaviour prediction. I very often do this kind of the way of thinking from a anthropologist kind of view, right? Very like you can't isolate technology in one sense, but you need to study the full culture, meaning values, beliefs, artefacts, tools, behaviours, and everything at once, and I think that's when you get the fuller picture. And I think if there's anything that we have learned in the past year, it's that a lot of questions do not have a yes or no answer. It's not black or white. Very often, it's a nuanced answer. And I think that is the great part with graphs. It allow us to kind of reason about things in a more networking kind of way, so it's almost like it's enabled also. Not uncovering only the knowledge within your data, but it's helping you, actually, to create a more sustainable mental model in the way you think, right? So I think that is a lot of the cool things because if you can't see it, I mean, then you can't really think it in that sense, right?
RVB: 00:05:26.369 Very true. Yeah. One of the examples that was featured in the newsletters was all about these links between academic papers, right? I mean, if there's one place where there's a lot of knowledge being created and managed, it's, obviously, in academia, right? And now, people are starting to look at these things, like structuring academic papers and the links, the cross references, the citations that people make between different academic papers and creating big networks around that, right? And it made me think of you, Stefan. I think I've shared it with you in one of our private conversations as well. But there was this wonderful article that, I thought, was out there by a lady called Anne-Laure Le Cunff, I think her name is. She created this article around thinking in maps. How, actually, structuring knowledge, structuring ideas, structuring data as maps - and maps is just a type of graph, I would argue - is, actually, this age-old metaphor dating from the Lascaux caves back to the Egyptians, back to the Greek cultures. All this age-old technique of structuring data in maps, in graphs to make sense of them, to make sense of information, of knowledge. And some fascinating stuff there. And, obviously, me as an orienteering geek, I also like my maps.
SW: 00:07:16.465 Yeah. You heard map, and then you start running, right? [laughter]
RVB: 00:07:19.504 Yes, exactly. I'm like, "Map? Map, map, map? Where's the map?" But it was a fantastic article, I thought. I don't know if you had any thoughts on that.
SW: 00:07:31.537 No, I think it's so interesting. And also, since COVID around, there was a lot of labs, innovation labs - what I do work with there at Neo - that we also connected all of this kind of medical data, right? Because most of the time, this is also open data sources, but they are very siloed. And that's the problem, I think, with academia. They kind of drill this kind of deep hole with specialised knowledge, and they kind of forget that a lot of the value is also when you connect them. So I think it's super interesting, again, as you said, because if you can't see it, you can't do anything with it, right? And then you start to forget about it. So I think it's super cool to see it. Yeah.
RVB: 00:08:18.875 By the way, I wanted to mention that in almost all of the examples that I looked at in the newsletter and the past couple of months, I found that there's a lot of graph data science actually being applied, right?
SW: 00:08:35.361 Oh, yes.
RVB: 00:08:35.431 I mean, you know that it's kind of a new thing to the graph community, to really have an enterprise grade tool for applying data science concepts to graphs. But I think almost every single one of these knowledge creation examples that we just talked about has a data science component to it. It's amazing how that's been boosted in the past couple of months. You know what I mean?
SW: 00:09:05.233 Yeah. And I think, from a transformation kind of standpoint, what we see here, as you say, there is literally in every single one, right, because all of a sudden, this is now, because of the release of GDS library and what we do, there's a possibility for pretty much anyone to just fire away and start going with this. And one of the things which I think is so interesting, there's a couple of really good articles from Kristof there, like one where he kind of compare Neo4j with NetworkX and do, in his own words, a drag race of sorts, which I think is also interesting to see. A lot of these things, you could do in smaller scale before, but you couldn't do it in the same kind of system where you have your transactional thing. And this is a lot of what I see because if you can put all this power in one system, and that system allows you to work faster, that is the game changer. Because if you can, I think the other article, there is a good example of calculating centrality at scale where the example was something about 20 million or something, and it should take approximately five years to calculate. You can do it in theory, but let me know any business that's going to wait five years for the result of that. That's, literally, not happening. But when you can start to get these examples in real time, then you're allowed to try out things. And I think this is just the beginning of seeing this whole wave of new companies behaving instead of just like the team at Google or some of those big giants, right? Now it's democrat times, so it's for everyone, so.
RVB: 00:10:51.795 Yes. Literally, that's the right word, right? It's democratisation. You used to require a super computer to do this stuff, right? I mean, I don't know if you remember, but Cray supercomputers, they used to have-- they used to have a spin-off company called Yarc. And Yarc, all they did was they sold custom Cray computers that did - drum roll - graph processing, right? That's what they did. And now, you run that on your laptop. The democratisation of this stuff is just so impressive. And I thought it was super interesting to see that article about comparing it to NetworkX because I actually like NetworkX. I think it's a really, really cool tool.
SW: 00:11:44.419 Yeah, it's amazing.
RVB: 00:11:46.967 But if you just look at Kristof's test, you can kind of see, to do something really simple, it takes minutes in NetworkX, and it takes seconds on Neo4j. And then you're like, "Hmm. That's not a trivial thing." That has an impact on the rate of innovation, the rate of how easy it is for people to adopt it, yes or no. That's not a trivial thing. To be able to do things at that speed, it's just kind of meaningful. And I'm quite happy about that. So it's very impressive.
SW: 00:12:26.767 Yeah. But I 100% agree to that. And I think this idea, you can look upon this from the time perspective, this is how much I would save, and then like 1 second compared to 10 minutes, it's not that much. I can go and take a coffee. But I think from an innovation and in a cognitive kind of human capacity, what happens when you are allowed to just try and explore is that you're going to try 100 new things during the rest of those seconds in that 10 minutes time, right, which will allow you to more of, again, the word that we said before, things that you didn't know that you wanted to know that you already, in one sense, had the data, but you couldn't see, right? So I think, again, that's so amazing to see this happening. I've just downloaded and try it out, working with embeddings and stuff during the holidays, and it's mind-blowing. I really encourage every single one of you out there to just do it and go ahead.
RVB: 00:13:27.117 Yeah. And there were some other-- I mean, I think there's some other examples, not just in processing speed but also in how quickly can you get something done. Can you get to an end result? I mean, if I look at the work that Adam did with this new graph app called Charts, I'm like, "Wow. This is so cool." Because I mean, you used to have to develop this entire front-end app to kind of expose this to your colleagues, right, to show it to someone. And now, it's just like click, click, click, click, click, and [inaudible], you're up and rolling, and you can show it to people, not just the speed of processing, but also the speed of development and things like that. GRANDstack, the BI connector, some really cool articles that we saw in the past couple of months that showed that. Really, really quite impressive, I must say.
SW: 00:14:20.687 Yeah. I really second that. And I think this is where we see, again, on a level of transformation within companies, right? Because there's one part to validate your use case from a data and technology standpoint, and then, of course, you need to validate the business part. But one thing, and I worked with Adam in a lot of these labs that we do, right, and this was an idea that we have been talking about for ages, and I'm so happy to see this coming alive because the one times that we tried putting people that literally coming into the room saying, "I hate data because it never works," give them the graph, the power of the graph in a simple interface like this, and all of a sudden, these people stand up and screaming, "I love data. I love graphs." So this is like the graph epiphany moment times like - I don't know - 100 or something. So I'm super happy to see it. And I think, again, it's just amazing to see how much goes so fast, so super cool.
RVB: 00:15:20.954 All right. Well, I think we're going to wrap up it. Just maybe one more question. What was your favourite title of the articles that you read? I know I have one. I have one in mind. [laughter]
SW: 00:15:40.368 Yeah. It's hard to beat that one.
RVB: 00:15:42.801 It's really hard to beat that one. It's a super, super-- Pulumi Platypus And The Very GRAND Stack, yeah. A really cool article. [laughter]
SW: 00:15:50.523 It's an amazing one. The one I was thinking-- actually, I don't know why. Maybe this is, again, me being nerdy again. But when you said any good title, the only one I was thinking was this network analysis of the Marvel Universe.
RVB: 00:16:05.990 Oh, yeah. Of course. Yeah.
SW: 00:16:06.410 But I guess that has nothing to do with titles. It has [crosstalk] me and my childish behaviour that will never leave my body. [laughter] Yeah.
RVB: 00:16:15.794 We love you for it. We love you for it. So hey, Stefan, thank you taking the time to talk us through these different posts. We're, obviously, going to include them in the transcription of the podcast. It's been great talking to you again. And I'm looking forward to a great new series, right, where we're going to keep this up and keep on making these little podcast recordings together. It's been so much fun.
SW: 00:16:41.855 Yes. Super great there. Happy to speak to you again, and waiting for the next one already.
RVB: 00:16:48.182 Me too. Thank you, Stefan. Have a great day.
About two months ago, my colleague Niels published an amazing blogpost. He showed us how to solve a problem that I really recognized: to make sense of your age-old Spotify playlists that are getting seriously out of hand. I have this problem in the real world: I keep adding songs to my "favorites" playlist, or to some collaborative playlists that I have with my kids/friends - but I end up with these huge gathering pots of songs that... really don't make a lot of sense anymore, and really have not much use anymore.
So Niels' blogpost was really useful: he used python, the spotipy wrapper of the Spotify Web API, and of course our favourite database, Neo4j and some of it's graphy tools (Graph Data Science to the rescue) to make a really fancy new set of Spotify playlists that were much more useable. Take a look at Niels' script over here. So I wanted to have a play with Niels' work in my own environment - and do some more exploration in Neo4j. Here's what happened.
