This Week in Neo4j – Medium, GraphTour, GraphQL, Survey, Swag


Welcome to this week in Neo4j where we round up what’s been happening in the world of graph databases in the last 7 days. As my colleague Mark Needham is still on his well earned vacation, I’m filling in this week.


Martin Preusse is a cell biology researcher and integrator working in Munich.

Martin is working at the Helmholtz Institute of Computational Biology and runs his own startup, Knowing Health which focuses on biological data integration to build an universal “cell map”.

Martin Preusse - This Week’s Featured Community Member

Martin Preusse – This Week’s Featured Community Member

Martin has been promoting and teaching the use of graphs in life-sciences for a long time. Most of his work is dealing with large graphs with hundreds of millions of elements capturing the intrinsic relationships between DNA, RNA, Proteins and their creation, mutation and use in biological pathways.

He gave several meetup and conference talks and represented Neo4j at healthcare hackathons. Martin presented at and helped ourganize our Graphs in Life Sciences Workshop in Berlin.

On behalf of the Neo4j community, thanks for all your work Martin and good luck for your research & work.

GraphTour 2018


This week in Milano, Italy, Graph Tour EMEA finished with a great event with impressive presentations and interesting discussions.

We really enjoyed meeting so many of you during the tour and want to thank everyone involved making the events around Graph Tour so successful.

For those of you in North America, it’s only getting started, with the first event in DC this last week, the upcoming stops of GraphTour are:

    • May 2nd, San Francisco
    • May 3rd, Toronto
    • May 8th, Boston
    • July 12th Seattle
    • July 19th Chicago

You’ll find members of our developer relations team (Jennifer, Karin, Ryan, Will) at any of these.

From our Team: GraphGear, Survey, Medium Publication, CLI, Visualization


This week we launched the long awaited Graph Gear Store where you can order Neo4j Swag to your heart’s contempt.

Thanks to everyone who answered our developer survey. We were really thrilled by the postitive response and suggestions for improvements. So far already 400 of you have claimed their $10 discount for the new swag store.

To make it easier for everyone to publish and promote articles around graphs and Neo4j, we launched a Neo4j Publication on Medium.

We already have 15 interesting stories for our more than 6000 followers there. If you want to be considered as a contributor and contribute articles, please drop us an email to devrel@neo4j.com. Feel free to submit your existing Medium posts but especially new ones.

Something to share with your friends and colleagues that wanted to try out Neo4j: Jennifer Reif wrote a quick 30-minute guide on how to get started.

After coming across the open CLI framework (OCLIF) from Heroku, I decided to give it a spin and write a small bolt-shell, read more about it here.

This week we started the article series on Graph Visualisation with Neo4j In the first post we looked at efficient Cypher queries for visualization needs with the Javascript driver. Stay tuned for a weekly update, the next one is from Will on Neovis.js.

GraphQL


If you have interesting feedback or use-cases to share for GraphQL and Neo4j, let us know, we’re happy to publish your articles. Also please make sure to send your feedback via the #neo4j-graphql channel in the Neo4j-Users Discord or via GitHub issues at the projects in the neo4j-graphql organization.

Articles & More


Chris Betz announced a new Clojure library called neo4j-clj which is built on top of the Java Bolt driver. It has some cool concepts. Check it out!

Thorsten Liebig of Derivo published his second blog post on the visual inference tool Semspect on top of Neo4j.

semspect node expansion

A really cool experiment is this CMR (Common Metadata Repository) which uses Neo4j as storage for NASA’s EODIS (Earth Observing System Data and Information System). It can be used for recommendations and visualization of metadata related to earthdata.nasa.gov.

The Gavaagi Lexicon is a live representation of term usage in many languages. “Our semantic memories learn language constantly from live data feeds with millions of documents per day from both social and news media.” This project creates a Neo4j Graph from entries of the lexicon.

This library implements a tokenstore in Neo4j for the “passwordless” Express extension that allows building webapps whose users can be authenticated without passwords.

Interviews


You remember Niklas Saers’ articles on Theo and GraphGopher? Now Rik van Bruggen interviewed Niklas in his podcast with interesting insights for Swift and iOS developers.

Rik also interviewed Dilyan Damyanov from Snowplow Analytics about how you can use a graph database for enhancing your event analytics, specifically for clickstream analysis. You might remember the Snowplow articles on that topic.

Next Week


What’s happening next week in the world of graph databases?

Date Title Where Speaker

April 20

Distributed processing of graph data with Neo4j and Apache Spark

DataScienceFest

Iryna Feuerstein

April 20

Discovering the power of graph databases with Python and Neo4j

PyConIT

Fabio Lamanna

April 20

Detecting immigrant communities in cities through the language of Twitter

DataBeersItaly

Fabio Lamanna

April 23

Building Knowledge Graph Using Neo4j

GraphDB Sydney

Joshua Yu

April 19/20

Fundamentals & Modeling Training

Seattle

Michael Kilgore

Tweet of the Week


Don’t forget to RT if you liked it too.

That’s all for this week. Have a great weekend!

Cheers, Michael