This Week in Neo4j – JavaScript CRUD Apps, Personalised Recommendation Engines, Graph Theory Tutorial


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.

This week we’ve got real time food and event recommendation engines, a JavaScript OGM, a Neo4j Operational Dashboard, and more!


This week’s featured community member is Meredith Broussard, Assistant Professor at New York University, with a focus on data-driven reporting, computational journalism, and data visualization.

Meredith Broussard - This Week’s Featured Community Member

Meredith Broussard – This Week’s Featured Community Member

Meredith has presented Neo4j workshops at NICAR 2017, showing attendees how to find connections in campaign finance data, and again in 2018, this time with a focus on social network analysis.

She will also be familiar to attendees of GraphConnect Europe 2017 where she participated in the Data Journalism in the Connected Age panel.

Meredith is currently applying the finishing touches to her book Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World which is due for release in May 2018.

On behalf of the Neo4j and data journalism communities, thanks for all your work Meredith!

Recommendation Engines for Food Recipes and Events


This week we have two stories about real time recommendation engines – a use case where graph databases excel.

Irene explains how Gousto are using Neo4j to build a personalised recipe recommendation engine that takes “the subjective aspect” of cooking into account.

Suprfanz’s Jennifer Webb presented Data science in practice: Examining events in social media at the Strata Data Conference in San Jose.

In the talk Jennifer shows how to build a recommendation engine for event promoters, starting from the community graph and using graph algorithms to find influencers. You can download the slides from Jennifer’s talk.

Neo4j Operational Dashboard, Javascript OGM, Graphs for Identity


    • David Allen has written a blog post where he creates a Neo4j Operational Dashboard with Hawtio, a modular dashboard for managing your Java stuff. David provides step by step instructions to expose Neo4j’s JMX metrics to the web and then wires it up to Hawtio via its own plugin architecture.
    • After writing several posts showing how to use Neo4j in Java applications, Adam Cowley switches languages and show how to use the Neo4j Driver with Node.js. Adam provides step by step instructions for using the driver and introduces Neode, a JavaScript OGM that makes it easy to build graph backed CRUD applications.
    • Alex Babeanu explains how Nulli have been using Neo4j to build solutions that help clients manage identities and their defining attributes and contexts. In the second half of the post Alex shows how you might go about building an access control API using GraphQL and the GRANDstack.
    • Thomas Frisendal continues his fascinating series of posts on graph data modelling with his latest post How to Make Decisions About Data Modeling Relationships in Databases. Thomas surveyed people working with graph and relational databases and summarises his findings in this post.

Geek Out: Graph Theory Tutorial


I came across Michel Caradec’s excellent workshop about implementing graph theory with Neo4j.

Michel set himself the challenge of implementing graph theory concepts using pure Cypher, and in the tutorial he shows how to create random graphs, extract sub graphs, generate adjacency matrices, and more.

If you geek out on graph theory you’re going to love this tutorial.

Next Week


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

Date Title Group Speaker

March 14th 2018

Data-journalisme et Panama Papers, GraphQL, curieux d’en savoir plus ?

Graph Database – Lille

Samuel Castillo, Benoît Simard

March 15th 2018

Neo4j Graph Platform March 2018 Meetup

Singapore Neo4j Meetup

Joshua Yu, Brandon Richards

Tweet of the Week


My favourite tweet this week was by Khairul Anwar:

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

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

Cheers, Mark