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?

Using Apache Zeppelin with Neo4j to analyse the FinCEN Files

Last week, we got another great and widely publicised case of Graph Databases' usefulness throw our way. The ICIJ published their FinCEN Files research, and on top of allowing you to explore the data on their website they also published an anonymised subset of the data as a series of CSV/JSON files. My friends and colleagues Michael Hunger, Will Lyon and the rest of the team, helped with the process of making this subset available as a Neo4j database (see this github repo), and there's even a super easy FinCEN Files Neo4j Sandbox that you can spin up in no time for some investigation fun.

So of course I had to take this data for a spin myself - it seems really important to me that more eyeballs are looking at this, and more people exposing the sometimes very questionable behaviour of the world's largest financial institutions.

Introducing Zeppelin

I had heard of some great technology a while ago that would allow people to use their data in a very different way, by looking at these interactive webpages that would interact with a Neo4j database.