Executives of Belgian Public Companies - revisited!

Long time ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Neo4j was just a tiny cute little junior graph database ;-),  I wrote a 2 part blogpost about a newspaper article that I had come across in De Tijd about the network of executives of Belgian public companies. You can find the articles over here: Part 1 and Part 2. Turns out - and I really was not aware of this until recently - that the newspaper has been running this type of publication on a yearly basis. Here's another article from 2018 on De Tijd’s website.

So imagine my surprise a few weeks ago, when I was contacted by one of the authors of that article, Thomas Roelens, to verify some info for the 2020 edition of this analysis. We had a great chat, and Thomas basically asked me to double check some of the analysis that he had done himself already. So, contrary to what happened in 2017 (where I had to dig into the HTML source to download the info from the website - Thomas just sent it to me, and basically allowed me to take it for a spin :) ...

Meanwhile, Thomas' article has been published in the newspaper: you can find it over here or over here. But here's my update below too.

Part 2/2: looking at the Web of Belgian Public Companies in Neo4j

Yesterday, I published part 1 of this short little blogpost on how we could load the dataset of a great newspaper article in De Tijd (our local financial/economic newspaper) into Neo4j. Of course, the whole point of that loading process (all of which is easily copied from github, btw) is to be able to do some additional querying on the dataset - just because we can :) ... So let's do some simple queries here, and then you can of course explore this some more yourself!

Start with some simple queries

In the article above, one of the key figures in the web of public companies, is Luc Bertrand, the CEO of Ackermans & Van Haaren - a former dredging company that turned into a holding company. Let's explore the network around him - by walking the paths from his node for three hops.

//network around Luc Bertrand 

match path = (m:Male)-[r*..3]-(n) 

where m.name contains "Bertrand"return path

That query gives us a nice little graph that we can explore:

Part 1/2: looking at the Web of Belgian Public Companies in Neo4j

Just a few days ago I came across an interesting article on Belgium's premier economic newspaper - (De Tijd, the local equivalent of the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal) that was over here:

The title of the article is "The Spider's web of publicly traded Belgium", referring to the web of companies, ceo's, chairmen and directors for the 126 public companies that Belgium still has.

Exploring the Paris Terrorist Attack network - part 3/3

Previously, on this blog, I had started writing about how we could get some of the data published by a local Belgian newspaper, De Standaard, on the Paris Terrorist Attack Network into Neo4j. In

• Part 1, we talked about loading the raw JSON data into Neo4j, and then in
• Part 2, we cleaned up some of the data for easy querying in Neo4j. 

So that's where we are. To wrap things up, I just wanted to illustrate some of the results and queries in Neo4j around some of the most interesting figures in this Terrorist network. I started some of my explorations around a widely reported terrorist, and Belgian national, called Salah Abdeslam.

So let's take a look at Salah in Neo4j.

Exploring the Paris Terrorist Attack network - part 2/3

In part 1 of this blogpost series, we got the basic Paris Terrorist Attack Network loaded into Neo4j. It looked like this:

There's a couple things that annoyed be about this graph:

1. First, the relationships are all "bidirectional", which really clutters the visualisation. In Neo4j, relationships are always directed, which kind of makes it awkward to store these bi-directional relationships like this. 
2. Of course, this graph was originally made by De Standaard newspaper in Flanders, Belgium, so therefore it was created in Dutch. A couple of the key concepts though (type of node, status of the node) would be easily and meaningfully translated for you to have any fun with the dataset.
3. The graph was not "labeled", and therefore lacked some essential structural elements that would allow for fun manipulation in the Neo4j Browser. 
4. The relationships did not really say anything about the type of relationship. 

Let's tackle these one by one.

Exploring the Paris Terrorist Attack Network - part 1/3

November 13th, 2015 - A day to remember

Just over two weeks ago, we remembered the sad anniversary of one of the most atrocious and vile terrorist attachs that our generation has seen. It's easy to forget many things in our daily rat race, but I don't think I will easily forget this video, which was all over the internet hours/days after the attack on the Bataclan concert hall in Paris:

All it takes is a drop of empathy and humanity to understand the horror that these victims went through. The sound of the one person shouting "Oscar .... Oscar... Oscar..." just keeps on ringing through my head.