The Neo4j Knowledge Graph

A couple of days ago, I wrote a graphgist about creating a true Knowledge Graph for the Neo4j ecosystem. Based on the fantastic Awesome Neo4j resource created by our friends at Neueda/Neueda4j. You can access it in a separate window over here.

In this post however, I will go into a bit more detail about how I went about creating that graph.

Google Spreadsheet is my friend

I mentioned already that I started from the awesome Awesome Neo4j github resource. And while it's a great idea to manage pages etc collaboratively on Github, I can't help but feel like there should be other and nicer ways of structuring that information. So I spent a couple of hours converting that information into a spreadsheet (which is publicly accessible over here):

This sheet contains 

• info about the resource (name and comments)
• the URL where you can find the resource
• info about the author (individual or organisation) that created/manages the resource

So it's a very, very easy graph model:

So all I needed to do was import that sheet into Neo4j. Easy...

Importing the Google Spreadsheet with Load CSV

As we know by know, it's really easy to download a Google spreadsheet as a CSV file, and then it is pretty darn easy to import that CSV into Neo4j with Load CSV. I have two versions of that load script:

• one with different statements that you can execute one by one
• one bigger statement that you can execute in one go.

The result is not a very big graph of course:

And now we can do some nice querying on it - just for fun!

Querying the Neo4j KnowledgeGraph

Obviously there are many different queries that we could run on an interesting graph like this. I have put a couple of them on Github as well. Here they are:

//Find some Authors, Resources and Tags
MATCH p = ((a:Author)--(r:Resource)--(t:Tag))
return p
limit 25

Gives you an initial sample of the graph:

Then we can explore a couple of specific graph neighborhoods:

//Find some Authors, Resources and Tags connected to Rik or Max

MATCH (t:Tag)--(r:Resource)--(a:Author)

where a.name contains "Rik" or a.name contains "Max"

return t,r,a

this gets us this one:

And then we can also "recreate" a spreadsheet-like view of the graph:

//find some resources and authors
MATCH (r:Resource)--(a:Author)
where a.name contains "Rik" or a.name contains "Max"
return distinct a.name as Author, r.name as Resource, r.url as URL, r.comments as Description
order by Author;

This gets us (pitty that the url's don't get hyperlinked like they do on the graphgist):

And then finally, let's look at some pathfinding - always interesting:

//find some paths between books and blogs
match (t1:Tag {name:"book"}), (t2:Tag {name:"blog"}),
p = allshortestpaths ( (t1)-[*]-(t2))
return p

limit 10

As usual, we end up with Michael Hunger again :)) 

So there you go. A first attempt at creating another graph-based knowledge repository for all things Neo4j.  Hope you guys enjoyed that. I know I did :))

Cheers

Rik