This Week in Neo4j – Graphing Tea and Brexit, Expanding the Startup Program, Importing CSV Files

Developer Relations Engineer
4 min read
GraphTour Europe is over after a fun final event in London. There’s now a break of a month or so before the US version gets started in Washington D.C. on 7th May, quickly followed by San Francisco on 9th May.
Don’t forget to opens in new tabregister if either of those cities are nearby.
I spent most of my time demonstrating Neuler – The Graph Algorithms Playground – with my colleague opens in new tabIrfan. You can learn more about that from our opens in new tabOnline Meetup video, and we’ll have a blog post ready soon. You can already install it via the opens in new tabGraph App Gallery
It was a big week for the GRANDstack – we had a live coding session, a presentation at GraphTour London, and a new starter kit was created.
I had fun graphing Brexit, Jennifer Reif and I wrote articles explaining how to load data into Neo4j, Ryan Boyd launched the expanded startup program, and more!
Featured Community Member: Pierre Romera
Our featured community member this week is opens in new tabPierre Romera, Chief Technology Officer of the opens in new tabInternational Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

Pierre Romera – This Week’s Featured Community Member
ICIJ is a U.S.-based non-profit with a “global network of reporters and media organizations who work together to investigate the most important stories in the world” and “believe journalism can bring about positive change”.
Pierre is extremely passionate about creating transformative tools to enable journalists to obtain salient knowledge within a wealth of unstructured data. Through technology, collaboration, and innovation, Pierre has worked on The Panama Papers, The opens in new tabParadise Papers, and The West African Leak, which are some of the most-notable, impactful, and biggest leaks in history, exposing crime and corruption through investigative journalism.
In the past, he co founded Journalism++, the Franco-German data journalism agency behind the Migrant Files, a project that won the European Press Prize in 2015 for Innovation. He is one of the pioneers of data journalism in France.
Thank you, Pierre, from us and the hundreds of strengthened journalists in your network.
This Week in the GRANDstack: Live Coding, Seed Application, GraphTour
This was a busy week for the opens in new tabGRANDstack.
In this week’s opens in new tabNeo4j Online Meetup, Gavin Williams started with a blank project and live coded an application using the GRANDstack.
opens in new tabErik Rahm created opens in new tabgrand-stack-seed – a seed application he created that has built in Auth and sample User GQL types/queries/mutations, to make it easy for front-end developers to quickly get up to speed with Neo4j and neo4j-graphql-js.
And opens in new tabRhys Evans shared the slides of his opens in new tabGraphQL heavy presentation from GraphTour London.
We’re Expanding the Neo4j Startup Program: Now More Entrepreneurs Get Neo4j Enterprise Edition & Neo4j Bloom – for Free
This week Ryan Boyd announced the expansion of the Neo4j Startup Program.
The program has been expanded to support much larger organizations, with up to 50 employees, and we’ve also made it easier to apply to the program and manage your membership.
And the icing on the cake is that members of the program can now get a license for the Neo4j Bloom graph visualization.
Graphing Brexit
On Wednesday night UK MPs voted no to series of potential Brexit options. and afterwards I read a lot analysis of how different individuals and parties had votes on various websites.
All the analysis seemed very tabular to me so I loaded the voting data into Neo4j and did a bit of graph analysis with Cypher, Neo4j Bloom, and the Graph Algorithms library.
Graphing Tea, Neo4j Import, Neo4j Speaker Program, Property graphs and Elixir
- opens in new tabJoe Depeau gives us a lesson in drinking tea in opens in new tabhis latest post, where he builds a tea knowledge graph containing tea, types and species of tea, where tea is grown, and more.
- opens in new tabJennifer Reif shared the slides from her talk opens in new tabGet To Know The Real World: Discovering Connected Data with a Graph Database.
- I wrote a blog post showing how to go from opens in new tabraw data and a graph model to a working Neo4j Database using the Neo4j Import Tool.
- Karin announced the opens in new tablaunch of the Neo4j Speaker Program. If you’re a graph enthusiast, and are willing and eager to share your knowledge and experiences, this one’s for you.
- opens in new tabTony Hammond has written a blog post in which he walks through a simple application for opens in new tabplaying around with Neo4j property graphs using Elixir.
Importing CSV Files: Neo4j Desktop and Sandbox
Jennifer Reif has been refreshing and expanding the content on the opens in new tabNeo4j Knowledge Base and opens in new tabDeveloper Pages, and this week explains how to load CSV files into Neo4j across different environments.
If your files are stored locally, on Dropbox, on Google Drive, on GitHub, or just online, Jennifer’s got you covered.
Tweet of the Week
My favourite tweet this week was by opens in new tabDom Gittins:
Perhaps we could add even more hype to the graph database landscape by changing @emileifrem’s name to ML AIfrem ?#GraphTour #Neo4j
— Dom Gittins (@comdotdom) March 26, 2019
Don’t forget to RT if you liked it too.
That’s all for this week. Have a great weekend!
Cheers, Mark