Tag: Graph Databases

QuickGraph#5 Learning a taxonomy from your tagged data

The Objective

Say we have a dataset of multi-tagged items: books with multiple genres, articles with multiple topics, products with multiple categories… We want to organise logically these tags -the genres, the topics, the categories…- in a descriptive but also actionable way. A typical organisation will be hierarchical, like a taxonomy.

But rather than building it manually, we are going to learn it from the data in an automated way. This means that the quality of the results will totally depend on the quality and distribution of the tagging in your data, so sometimes we’ll produce a rich taxonomy but sometimes the data will only yield a set of rules describing how tags relate to each other.

Finally, we’ll want to show how this taxonomy can be used and I’ll do it with an example on content recommendation / enhanced search. Continue reading “QuickGraph#5 Learning a taxonomy from your tagged data” →

Graph DB + Data Virtualization = Live dashboard for fraud analysis

The scenario

Retail banking: Your graph-based fraud detection system powered by Neo4j is being used as part of the controls run when processing line of credit applications or when accounts are provisioned. It’s job is to block -or at least to flag- potentially fraudulent submissions as they come into your systems. It’s also sending alarms to fraud operations analysts whenever unusual patterns are detected in the graph so they can be individually investigated ASAP.

This is all working great but you want other analysts in your organisation to benefit from the super rich insights that your graph database can deliver, people whose job is not to react on the spot to individual fraud threats but rather understand the bigger picture. They are probably more strategic business analysts, maybe some data scientists doing predictive analysis too and they will typically want to look at fraud patterns globally rather than individually, combine the information in your fraud detection graph with other datasources (external to the graph) for reporting purposes, to get new insights, or even to ‘learn’ new patterns by running algorithms or applying ML techniques.

In this post I’ll describe through an example how Data Virtualization can be used to integrate your Neo4j graph with other data sources providing a single unified view easy to consume by standard analytical/BI tools. Continue reading “Graph DB + Data Virtualization = Live dashboard for fraud analysis” →

Neo4j is your RDF store (part 1)

If you want to understand the differences and similarities between RDF and the Labeled Property Graph implemented by Neo4j, I’d recommend you watch this talk I gave at Graph Connect San Francisco in October 2016.

Intro

Let me start with some basics: RDF is a standard for data exchange, but it does not impose any particular way of storing data.

What do I mean by that? I mean that data can be persisted in many ways: tables, documents, key-value pairs, property graphs, triple graphs… and still be published/exchanged as RDF. Continue reading “Neo4j is your RDF store (part 1)” →

QuickGraph#2 How is Wikipedia’s knowledge organised

The dataset

For this QuickGraph I’ll use data about Wikipedia Categories. You may have noticed at the bottom of every Wikipedia article a section listing the categories it’s classified under. Every Wikipedia article will have at least one category, and categories branch into subcategories forming overlapping trees. It is sometimes possible for a category (and the Wikipedia hierarchy is an example of this) to be a subcategory of more than one parent category, so the hierarchy is effectively a graph. Continue reading “QuickGraph#2 How is Wikipedia’s knowledge organised” →

Building a semantic graph in Neo4j

There are two key characteristics of RDF stores (aka triple stores): the first and by far the most relevant is that they represent, store and query data as a graph. The second is that they are semantic, which is a rather pompous way of saying that they can store not only data but also explicit descriptions of the meaning of that data. The RDF and linked data community often refer to these explicit descriptions as ontologies. In case you’re not familiar with the concept, an ontology is a machine-readable description of a domain that typically includes a vocabulary of terms and some specification of how these terms inter-relate, imposing a structure on the data for such domain. This is also known as a schema. In this post, both terms schema and ontology will be used interchangeably to refer to these explicitly described semantics. Continue reading “Building a semantic graph in Neo4j” →