Everything Goes Better With Bacon by by Nick Quinn, Senior Software Developer, InfiniteGraph.
From the post:
Whenever someone considers a large movie database like Internet Movie Database, or IMDB, inevitably the classic six degrees of Kevin Bacon problem comes up. It is a famous problem posed like this, “…any individual involved in the Hollywood, California film industry can be linked through his or her film roles to actor Kevin Bacon within six steps” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon]. This problem even helped Kevin Bacon begin his own social charity organization called SixDegrees.org linking people with charities that they might be interested in.
Below is an example of how InfiniteGraph can be used to store and navigate through large sets of connected data like the IMDB. In the example, I will show how to both find the links between various actors and Kevin Bacon, but also how to output the navigation results in various formats including JSON and GraphML. Note: Custom navigator plugins and custom formatter plugins (including the default JSON/GraphML formatters) can be created and used in any InfiniteGraph (2.1) graph database instance. See the InfiniteGraph developer wiki for more details and examples of how to write and use custom plugins (http://wiki.infinitegraph.com).
Here is a visualization of the actors connected to Kevin Bacon within just two degrees of separation (up to 1500 connections).
Even if you are not interested in movies or Kevin Bacon (there are a few of us around), this post rocks!
Good demonstration of the power of a graph database (in this case, InfiniteGraph) for navigation of relationships in data.
Code for visualization as well!