Graphistania 2.0 - Episode 4 - This Month in Neo4j

Yey! My friend StefanW and I got round to recording another Graphistania episode, episode 4 already - time flies when you are having fun! This month, again, we have so much great content popping up in the This Week in Neo4j (Twin4j) newsletter, that we could probably fill a few hours talking about it. So in the podcast, we will only talk about a handful - covering things like

• the great momentum that we have in the Neo4jcommunity! Take a look at initiatives like Global Graph Celebration Day, and listen to Neo4j's mad scientist Michael Hunger on graphs, databases and relationships on a different podcast.
• the start of the Neo4j Graphtour, for the 3rd year already, in Amsterdam. This year this actually coincided with the launch of Neo4j 4.0 - one of the best releases of Neo4j that I have personally ever witnessed. I have actually been writing a bit about this myself - read about how I how I child-proofed my beergraph with fine-grained security and how I did something similar by adding security to a fraud investigation graph. There's other articles as well, like When and how to implement Sharding in Neo4j 4.0.
• Various personal graphs projects, like Mark's Australian Open graph and the QuickGraph #3 on Itsu Allergens. I love how Mark summarized it: most of analysis could be done in relational, but "Things got more interesting in the last section where we did set analysis. I found having the data in a graph structure made was helpful for answering these questions, especially when we were looking for the non existence of a relationship."
• a number of Health related articles, like that visualisation of the data from the Personal Genome Project, or the Google project wiuth the “Largest Ever” Map of Brain Connectivity
• And then of course there were various "Other" posts that we really liked, like how to be Working With Spatial Data In Neo4j GraphQL In The Cloud, and the post about Aaia - AWS Identity And Access Management Visualizer And Anomaly Finder. Last but not least, you should also take a look at the Graphaware Hume platform - with an excellent powerful demo recording over here.

Graphistania 2.0 - Episode 3 - This Month in Neo4j

Happy new year everyone - although it actually seem like the holidays are already very far behind us! But great times were had, at least in my family, and so I feel super energised to make 2020 another great start to a decade of graphs :) ... Here's to that!

It also means that we are continuing to see all these awesome community stories pop up left right and center in the Neo4j "This week in Neo4j" developer newsletter. And so on our Graphistania podcast, we are going to continue talking about these on a monthly basis. So that's what we're doing - and I have again invited my friend and colleague Stefan Wendin to join me.

From the newsletter, we always select a few stories that we think will be more interesting and/or meaningful to discuss. This month, we found a number of them, and the interesting thing was that the graph-stories seemed to play at very different scales... The Personal, Corporate, and Society levels. Here are some of the ones we liked:

At the Personal scale

• Alex Woolford - Network analysis with Neo4j / Kafka / Zeek. Alex also has this really cool video on "Event driven parenting": if your kid is getting bad grades, that event will lead to no more PS4 network access :) ... Bit harsh - but still!

At the Corporate scale

• IT centric example: Managing VMware infrastructure with Neo4j - great example of how to understand infrastructure dependencies in an IT environment with graphs.
• Business centric examples: Analysing online customer journeys in 3D and Using Augmented Reality to create an indoor navigation system with VIROREACT. This also reminded me of these examples of using Neo4j to build digital twins for wind farms and digital twins for subsea gas. 
• Maybe one more - very specific to the graph world and totally optional: Keeping track of graph changes using temporal versioning. This references: Neo4j Versioner - they recently released version 2. I really like that. 

At the Society scale, we saw some amazing posts:

• State-Sponsored Twitter Accounts Pushing For War With Iran
• Visualizing Breast Cancer Data with Neo4j and GraphXR 

So I think you agree that we had plenty of stuff to talk about. Let's get into that!

Graphistania 2.0 - Episode 2 - This Month in Neo4j

Happy days, we have recorded the second episode of the second version of our Graphistania Neo4j community podcast.

In this chat between myself and Stefan Wendin, we talked about a bunch of cool articles in the This Week in Neo4j (TWIN4J) newsletter:

From the November 9th TWIN4J twin4j post

• Introducing Aura: https://neo4j.com/blog/introducing-neo4j-aura-a-new-graph-database-as-a-service/
• How to build a knowledge graph from scratch even if you are not really a full-blown developer
• Structural balance in graphs: https://medium.com/neo4j/understanding-alliances-exploring-structural-balance-with-neo4j-71fc08f10985

From the November 16th TWIN4J

• Into the multiverse: Exploring multiple scenarios for structural balance

From the November 23rd TWIN4j

• Building a graph analytics pipeline in Neo4j to explore the transport system in Rome
• Analysing online customer journeys in 3D

From the November 30th, 2019

• My own work on the Carrefour Shopping ticket analysis
• The fashion Knowledge Graph. Inferencing with Ontologies in Neo4j
• Decision trees in Neo4j: thepill

Here's the recorded chat:


And here's the transcription!

Graphistania 2.0 - Episode 1 - This Month in Neo4j

Hello everyone!

it has been deadly quiet on this page, hasn't it. That's really oh so true, and I am / was not happy with that. This blog, the podcast, and everything around has always been my humble contribution to our awesome Neo4j community, and in the past 6+ month or so, I have not been doing my part. Sorry for that. Lots of excuses that I will not bore you with, but I am going to try to do better.

Part of the reason for the silence was of course that I thought that the podcast formula (in which I always asked for the three same basic things: who are you, why graphs, what's coming in the future) had kind of run its course. 100+ episodes had given me lots of fantastic conversations, but it was time to move on. I needed a new formula.

A couple of weeks ago, while doing absolutely NOTHING graph related - unless you want to imagine a graph of a bathroom, a shower, soap, and yours truly - I came up with an idea. What if we did episodes about all of the cool, innovative things that are popping up in our community on a daily basis? Sure. But where could I find those? Well, on the Neo4j developer relations "This week in Neo4j" (TWIN4J) newsletter probably, right! But who would I talk to that about? Well... this is where I found a great partner in crime. I thought about one of my most creative colleagues, someone who is paid to be creative and is really good at it - and came up with noone other than Stefan Wendin. Stefan leads our Innovation Labs in EMEA, and has presented on that topic extensively in the past.

Neo4j Innovation Lab, Stefan Wendin, Neo4j from Neo4j

So we have lots of innovation. We have someone who KNOWS a lot about innovation. So let's then have a chat about some of these innovative graph database applications, shall we? Here goes.