Neo4j: What is a node? by Mark Needham.
From the post:
One of the first things I needed to learn when I started using Neo4j was how to model my domain using nodes and relationships and it wasn’t initially obvious to me what things should be nodes.
Luckily Ian Robinson showed me a mini-algorithm which I found helpful for getting started. The steps are as follows:
- Write out the questions you want to ask
- Highlight/underline the nouns
- Those are your nodes!
This is reasonably similar to the way that we work out what our objects should be when we’re doing OO modelling and I thought I’d give it a try on some of the data sets that I’ve worked with recently:
- Female friends of friends that somebody could go out with
- Goals scored by Arsenal players in a particular season
- Colleagues who have similar skills to me
- Episodes of a TV program that a particular actor appeared in
- Customers who would be affected if a piece of equipment went in for repair
If you’re like me and aren’t that great at English grammar we can always cheat and get NLTK to help us out:
Pay particular attention to Mark’s use of NLTK to extract likely nodes from data.
As far as I can tell, Neo4j does not support half-edges, that is an edge with only one node. To support the use case where the player of a role (in topic map parlance) is unknown.
We know that Mary is married, for example, but we don’t know the name of her husband.
But we want to assign properties to the marriage edge (association) but there is no edge to carry those properties. Such as who reported Mary was married?
Any graph databases to suggest that support half-edges? (Computational Geometry Algorithms Library (CGAL) supports half-edges but isn’t a graph database.)