Recently I was talking to one of our clients who was looking to put in place a knowledge graph for their organisation. They were specifically interested in better monitoring and making sense of the industry news for their organisation. There's a ton of solutions to this problem, and some of them seem like a really simple and out of the box toolset that you could just implement by giving them your credit card details - off the shelf stuff. No doubt, that could be an interesting approach, but I wanted to demonstrate to them that it could be really much more interesting to build something - on top of Neo4j. I figured that it really could not be too hard to create something meaningful and interesting - and whipped out my cypher skills and started cracking to see what I could do. Let me take you through that.
The idea and setup
I wanted to find an easy way to aggregate data from a particular company or topic, and import that into Neo4j. Sounds easy enough, and there are actually a ton of commercial providers out there that can help with that. I ended up looking at Eventregistry.org, a very simple tool - that includes some out of the box graphyness, actually - that allows me to search for news articles and events on a particular topic.
So I went ahead and created a search phrase for specific article topics (in this case "Database", "NoSQL", and "Neo4j") on the Eventregistry site, and got a huge number of articles (46k!) back.