Sentiment Analysis on Twitter Data Using Neo4j and Google Cloud

In this blog post, we’re going to walk through designing a graph processing algorithm on top of Neo4j that discovers the influence and sentiment of tweets in your Twitter network.

The source code for this reference application is open source. You can find the GitHub project here.

Graph Data Modeling

The first thing we’ll need to do is to design a data model for analyzing the sentiments and influences of users on Twitter. This example iterates from an earlier graph processing example described in another blog post. I recommend taking a look at that post to better understand the concepts I talk about in this one.

The diagram below is the graph data model that we will use to import, analyze, and query data from Twitter.

In the diagram above, the following relationships are described.

• Users follow other users

• Users create tweets

• Tweets contain phrases

• Phrases are categorized into topics

Twitter User Ranking

For this first blog post we’re going to focus on generating a rank of influential Twitter users in my social network that tells me which topics a user tweets about.

The screenshot above is from the results of a Neo4j cypher query. Here we find a list of Twitter users that were discovered using a crawling algorithm based on PageRank. This output is similar to the dashboard that was created in an earlier blog post, but adds in a top category, top phrase, and a sentiment score.

Creating a PageRank Analytics Platform Using Spring Boot Microservices

This article introduces you to a sample application that combines multiple microservices with a graph processing platform to rank communities of users on Twitter. We’re going to use a collection of popular tools as a part of this article’s sample application. The tools we’ll use, in the order of importance, will be:

• Spring Boot

• Neo4j

• Apache Spark

• Docker

• RabbitMQ

Ranking Twitter Profiles

Let’s do an overview of the problem we will solve as a part of our sample application. The problem we’re going to solve is how to discover communities of influencers on Twitter using a set of seed profiles as inputs. To solve this problem without a background in machine learning or social network analytics might be a bit of a stretch, but we’re going to take a stab at it using a little bit of computer science history.

The PageRank algorithm, created by Google co-founder Larry Page, was first used by Google to rank website documents from analyzing the graph of backlinks between sites.

I dug up the original research paper on PageRank from Stanford for some inspiration. In the paper, the authors talk about the notion of approximating the "importance" of an academic publication by weighting the value of its citations.

The reason that PageRank is interesting is that there are many cases where simple citation counting does not correspond to our common sense notion of importance. For example, if a webpage has a link to the Yahoo home page, it may be just one link but it is a very important one. This page should be ranked higher than many pages with more links but from obscure places. PageRank is an attempt to see how good an approximation to "importance" can be obtained just from the link structure.

— Page, Lawrence and Brin, Sergey and Motwani, Rajeev and Winograd, Terry (1999)
The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web

Now let’s take the same definition that is described in the paper and apply it to our problem of discovering important profiles on Twitter. Twitter users typically follow other users to track their updates as a part of their stream. We can use the same reasoning behind using PageRank on citations to approximate the "importance" of profiles on Twitter. This reasoning would tell us that it’s not the number of followers that make a profile important, it is measured by how important those followers are.

That’s exactly what we’re going to build in this article, and we’ll end up with something that looks like the following table.

Rank	Photo	Name	Profile	Following	Followers	PageRank	Change
1.		Paul Ford	@ftrain	175	31948	7368.2417
2.		harper	@harper	1024	32452	6754.455
3.		Bret Victor	@worrydream	35	37658	6747.585
4.		Lincoln Stoll	@lstoll	872	41067	5976.3555
5.		kate matsudaira	@katemats	20465	25799	5916.3843
6.		rands	@rands	741	35079	5888.145
7.		Alex Payne	@al3x	405	41099	5547.4307
8.		Chris Wanstrath	@defunkt	5645	45310	4787.9644
9.		SaraReyChipps	@SaraJChipps	1007	29617	4271.676
10.		Leah Culver	@leahculver	491	30723	3852.3728

The first thing we’re going to need to worry about when building this solution is how we’re going to calculate PageRank on potentially millions of users and links. To do this, we’re going to use something called a graph processing platform.

What is a graph processing platform?

A graph processing platform is an application architecture that provides a general-purpose job scheduling interface for analyzing graphs. The application we’ll build will make use of a graph processing platform to analyze and rank communities of users on Twitter. For this we’ll use Neo4j Mazerunner, an open source project that I started that connects Neo4j’s database server to Apache Spark.

The diagram below illustrates a graph processing platform similar to Neo4j Mazerunner.

Submitting PageRank Jobs to GraphX

The graph processing platform I’ve described will provide us with a general purpose API for submitting PageRank jobs to Apache Spark’s GraphX module from Neo4j. The PageRank results from GraphX will be automatically applied back to Neo4j without any additional work to manually handle data loading. The workflow for this is extremely simple for our purposes. From a backend service we will only need to make a simple HTTP request to Neo4j to begin a PageRank job.

I’ve also taken care of making sure that the graph processing platform is easily deployable to a cloud provider using Docker containers. In a previous article, I describe how to use Docker Compose to run Mazerunner as a multi-container application. We’ll do the same for this sample application but extend the Docker Compose file to include additional Spring Boot applications that will become our backend microservices.

By default, Docker Compose will orchestrate containers on a single virtual machine. If we were to build a truly fault tolerant and resilient cloud-based application, we’d need to be sure to scale our system to multiple virtual machines using a cloud platform. This is the subject of a later article.

Now that we understand how we will use a graph processing platform, let’s talk about how to build a microservice architecture using Spring Boot and Spring Cloud to rank profiles on Twitter.

Building Microservices

I’ve talked a lot about microservices in past articles. When we talk about microservices we are talking about developing software in the context of continuous delivery. Microservices are not just smaller services that scale horizontally. When we talk about microservices, we are talking about being able to create applications that are the product of many teams delivering continuously in independent release cycles. Josh Long and I describe at length how to untangle the patterns of building and operating JVM-based microservices in O’Reilly’s Cloud Native Java.

In this sample, we’ll build 4 microservices, each as a Spring Boot application. If we were to build this architecture as microservices in an authentic scenario, each microservice would be owned and managed by a different team. This is an important differentiation in this new practice, as there is much confusion around what a microservice is and what it is not. A microservice is not just a distributed system of small services. The practice of building microservices should never be without the discipline of continuous delivery.

For the purposes of this article, we’ll focus on scenarios that help us gain experience and familiarity with building distributed systems that resemble a microservice architecture.

Overview

Now let’s do a quick overview of the concepts we’re going to cover as a part of this sample application. We will apply the same recipe from previous articles on similar topics for building microservices with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud. The key difference from my previous articles is that we are going to create a data service that does both batch processing tasks as well as exposing data as HTTP resources to API consumers.

System Architecture Diagram

The diagram below shows each component and microservice that we will create as a part of this sample application. Notice how we’re connecting the Spring Boot applications to the graph processing platform we looked at earlier. Also, notice the connections between the services, these connections define communication points between each service and what protocol is used.

The three applications that are colored in blue are stateless services. Stateless services will not attach a persistent backing service or need to worry about managing state locally. The application that is colored in green is the Twitter Crawler service. Components that are colored in green will typically have an attached backing service. These backing services are responsible for managing state locally, and will either persist state to disk or in-memory.

Building Microservices with Polyglot Persistence Using Spring Cloud and Docker

This series continues from the last blog post about building microservices using Spring Cloud. This post has two parts. The first part describes how to create cloud-native data services using Spring Boot. The second part is a companion example project that uses Docker Compose to run multiple microservices locally to simulate a polyglot persistence setup.

What is polyglot persistence?

Polyglot persistence is a term that describes an architecture that uses a collection of different database solutions as a part of a platform’s core design. More plainly, each backing service is managed from an exclusive connection to a Spring Boot service that exposes domain data as HTTP resources.

The central idea behind polyglot persistence is that service architectures should be able to utilize the best languages for the job at hand. There is no clear definition of how to do this well, and it tends to evolve organically as central databases become cumbersome when required to add new features.

Spring Boot Roles

When designing microservices that manage exclusive access to multiple data providers, it can be useful to think about the roles in which your microservices will play.

We can think of a Spring Boot application as the basic building block for our microservice architecture.

Figure 1. Each Spring Boot application plays a role when integrating with other services

The diagram above describes six Spring Boot applications that are color coded to describe the role they play when integrated using Spring Cloud.

Data Services

Each Spring Boot application in a microservices architecture will play a role to varying degrees of importance. The data service role is one of the most important roles in any setup. This role handles exposing the application’s domain data to other microservices in the platform.

Polyglot Data Services

The diagram below describes an example microservice architecture with multiple Spring Boot applications that expose data from multiple database providers.

Figure 2. Example Polyglot Persistence Architecture

Using Graph Analysis to Decompose Monoliths into Microservices with Neo4j

This blog post will take some of my learnings in developing microservices and apply a graph processing technique to simulate the decomposition of service architectures into microservices.

What is a microservice?

Microservices are an extension of SOA principles that are better suited for agile software development. A microservice architecture usually starts from decomposing monolithic applications into services that are cheaper to evolve and easier to throw away. The guiding theme behind this movement is to decentralize change management and reduce conflicts that tend to cause roadblocks in an SOA-based platform.

Using Data to Design Better Technology Platforms

Microservices aren't new. The pattern has been adopted at many software companies.

When companies on an SOA add new features to their platform, there tends to be a fair amount of conflicts between service teams. Certain services in the SOA become more relied upon by other services or applications in the platform.

What I've seen is that services tend towards growth rather than decomposing into smaller units. It's far easier to add features to existing services than to create new services that require operational support. Every new service requires a focus on deployment and configurations. The complexity can be tough to support with rigid processes and a lack of focus on automation.

Jumping head first into microservices is a major commitment. A monolith will have highly centralized components that will gain more mass as new microservices are born, adding additional complexity with each service call to replace modules or add functionality. It's important to analyze these connections to understand which services in an SOA are becoming more depended on.

Measuring Service Centrality

My time spent using graphs to analyze data has given me a great tool for understanding how to use data to drive decisions on decomposing an SOA. The first metric that I will use is network centrality. This metric measures how centralized a service is within a network of dependencies.

The whole idea here is to determine what components in a service are good candidates for a microservice. This can be determined by finding a component that will be the highest contributor to decreasing the overall centrality of a service, once removed.

The graph metric for centrality is a great starting point to analyze how services are gaining mass and how best to decompose services.

Decomposition Strategy

The decomposition strategy that I would like to demonstrate is based on RESTful web services that manage a set of resources.

Each service will expose a set of REST API methods to interact with the resources of the domain. The graph data model that will be used to calculate centrality will be represented by relationships of service to service interactions.

Graphs are a great way to model the resources of a domain and their interactions. Below I've sketched out a domain model for an eCommerce website based on an example by Chris Richardson.

This domain model has a set of resources which are represented by their label. Those resources are:

• Customer
• Order
• Account
• Address
• Product
• Warehouse
• Credit Card

In a monolithic architecture all of our services will be contained in a single project, for example a WAR, with modules representing each service.

From Chris's example, we have the following deployment model:

From this example deployment model I've mapped the calls from each module to resources in the domain. That ends up looking like this:

As systems scale and dependencies grow, they become harder for us to understand. However, these mappings can be tremendously valuable to understand which service is best suited to first become a microservice.

Mapping Stories to Release Artifacts

Conway's law states that organizations are constrained to produce systems that mirror their communication structures. In order to make the jump to microservices we need to scale teams horizontally and not vertically. To do this well, we need to figure out how to split applications into independently releasable containers. One principle metric to be aware of is the number of business stories that are affected per release. Each of these stories have a certain level of functionality that drives revenue for the business. This can help determine which features are more valuable in terms of revenue than others.

Let's take for example the following story.

As a user, I want to be able to browse the product catalog so that I can find products I want to buy.

If the product catalog becomes unavailable to users of the website, there will be an impact to revenue. This shows that not all user stories have the same business value.

Ideally we want to find ways to empower single teams to be accountable for single stories. This way, if there is an outage that affects a story, teams will have more autonomy to bring that functionality back online.

Dependency Graph

Below you will find an example graph data model of the service dependencies shared between containers, services, resources, and user stories that describe product features.

In order to generate a rich dataset to analyze, I chose to use the concept of a user story as an added dimension to the dependency graph. User stories do well to group together a set of features. These features act as a good boundary criteria for determining how to make components more modular from a business value perspective.

The relationships between concepts in this dependency graph are driven by the following rules:

• User stories depend on domain resources
• Domain resources are owned by services
• Services are managed by teams
• A service belongs to a deployment container

Interactive Neo4j GraphGist Example

I've put together a step by step walkthrough of how you can use Neo4j to do graph analysis to functionally decompose a monolithic application into microservices.

In the coming months I will be focusing a lot on this topic with demos that revolve around how to build great microservice architectures using Spring boot.

Getting Started with Apache Spark and Neo4j Using Docker Compose

I've received a lot of interest in Neo4j Mazerunner since first announcing it a few months ago. People from around the world have reached out to me and are excited about the possibilities of using Apache Spark and Neo4j together. From authors who are writing new books about big data to PhD researchers who need it to solve the world's most challenging problems.

I'm glad to see such a wide range of needs for a simple integration like this. Spark and Neo4j are two great open source projects that are focusing on doing one thing very well. Integrating both products together makes for an awesome result.

Less is always more, simpler is always better.

Both Apache Spark and Neo4j are two tremendously useful tools. I've seen how both of these two tools give their users a way to transform problems that start out both large and complex into problems that become simpler and easier to solve. That's what the companies behind these platforms are getting at. They are two sides of the same coin.

One tool solves for scaling the size, complexity, and retrieval of data, while the other is solving for the complexity of processing the enormity of data by distributed computation at scale. Both of these products are achieving this without sacrificing ease of use.

Inspired by this, I've been working to make the integration in Neo4j Mazerunner easier to install and deploy. I believe I've taken a step forward in this and I'm excited to announce it in this blog post.

Categorical PageRank Using Neo4j and Apache Spark

PageRank is an important concept in computer science and modern technology. It is important because it is the underlying algorithm that mostly dictates what more than 3 billion users who use the internet experience as they browse the world wide web.

How does PageRank work?

The first PageRank algorithm was developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brinn at Stanford in 1996. Sergey Brinn had the idea that pages on the world wide web could be ordered and ranked by analyzing the number of links that point to each page. This idea was the foundation of the imminent rise of Google as the world's most popular search engine, with now over 3.5 billion searches made by its users every day.

PageRank gives us a measure of popularity in an ever connected world of information. With an enormous degree of complexity increasing every day in the virtual space of information sharing, PageRank gives us a way to understand what is important to us as users.

The unfortunate bit of this is that PageRank itself is mostly unapproachable to anything but seasoned engineers and esteemed academics. That's why I want to make it easier for every developer around the world to make this algorithm the foundation of their innovative desires.

Distributing PageRank Jobs

It should be no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I am all about the graph. Graphs are the best abstraction of data that we have today. The concept is brilliantly easy and intuitive. Nodes represent data points and are described by meta data. Relationships connect nodes together, also described by meta data, and they enrich the information of each node relative to one another.

Neo4j Mazerunner Project

As I have been building the open source project Neo4j Mazerunner to use Apache Spark GraphX and Neo4j for big scale graph analysis, I've come to understand the need for breaking down PageRank into categories. Something I call 'Categorical PageRank'.

What Graph Analysis of Wikipedia Tells Us About the Relevancy of Recent Knowledge

The chart below was generated using data analyzed with a Neo4j Graph Database and Apache Spark GraphX. 10.9 million Wikipedia articles and 110 million hyperlinks were analyzed to produce a PageRank and Triangle Count for each node in the graph. The Triangle Count metric is a measure of clustering, while the PageRank metric is a measure of relevancy.

Knowledge moves forward in time

Every year through 1850—2012 on the X-axis represents a Wikipedia page that describes historical events and facts about that calendar year. Link analysis was performed on the inbound and outbound hyperlinks for each page and all other pages in the graph that contribute to that page's relevancy.

The chart describes a probability distribution over time. This distribution indicates that if a person were to randomly click hyperlinks starting from any page on Wikipedia, the person would move towards articles with a higher closeness centrality to Category:Year pages occurring later in the timeline.

When it comes to our collective human knowledge, as time moves forward, distant history becomes inversely relevant to more recent events in our timeline.

To see this pattern you can click and drag areas of the chart to zoom in. You'll notice the pattern is local as well as global.

Why is the year 2000 so relevant?

Wikipedia, the world's largest encyclopedia of human knowledge, was first launched on January 15th, 2001.

Links

• Chart source code: jsfiddle/highcharts
• In an upcoming blog post I'll walk you through launching an EC2 Spark Cluster with a Wikipedia dataset in Neo4j. Stay tuned!
• If you're interested in learning more about how I computed the graph metrics for this chart, take a look at this blog post about how to extend Neo4j to do big data analysis with Apache Spark GraphX

A Docker Image for Graph Analytics on Neo4j with Apache Spark GraphX

I've just released a useful new Docker image for graph analytics on a Neo4j graph database with Apache Spark GraphX. This image deploys a container with Apache Spark and uses GraphX to perform ETL graph analysis on subgraphs exported from Neo4j. This docker image is a great addition to Neo4j if you're looking to do easy PageRank or community detection on your graph data. Additionally, the results of the graph analysis are applied back to Neo4j.

This gives you the ability to optimize your recommendation-based Cypher queries by filtering and sorting on the results of the analysis.

Photo credit AMPLab Berkley

Using Apache Spark and Neo4j for Big Data Graph Analytics

As engineers, when we think about how to solve big data problems, evaluating technologies becomes a choice between scalable and not scalable. Ideally we choose the technologies that can scale to a variety of business problems without hitting a ceiling down the road.

Database technologies have evolved to be able to store big data, but are largely inflexible. The data models require tedious transformations and shuffling around of data. This is a complex process that is compounded in its complexity by combining a variety of inflexible solutions and platforms.

Fast and scalable analysis of big data has become a critical competitive advantage for companies. There are open source tools like Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark that are providing opportunities for companies to solve these big data problems in a scalable way. Platforms like these have become the foundation of the big data analysis movement.

Still, where does all that data come from? Where does it go when the analysis is done?

Deep Learning Sentiment Analysis for Movie Reviews using Neo4j

While the title of this article references Deep Learning, it's important to note that the process described below is more of a deep learning metaphor into a graph-based machine learning algorithm. No neural networks are used.

Sentiment analysis uses natural language processing to extract features of a text that relate to subjective information found in source materials.

Movie Review Sentiment Analysis

A movie review website allows users to submit reviews describing what they either liked or disliked about a particular movie. Being able to mine these reviews and generate valuable meta data that describes its content provides an opportunity to understand the general sentiment around that movie in a democratized way. That’s a pretty cool thing if you think about it. Using machine learning we can democratize subjectivity about anything in the world. We can make an objective analysis of subjective content, giving us the ability to better understand trends around products and services that we can use to make better decisions as consumers.

Using a Graph Database for Deep Learning Text Classification

Graphify is a Neo4j unmanaged extension that provides plug and play natural language text classification.

Graphify gives you a mechanism to train natural language parsing models that extract features of a text using deep learning. When training a model to recognize the meaning of a text, you can send an article of text with a provided set of labels that describe the nature of the text. Over time the natural language parsing model in Neo4j will grow to identify those features that optimally disambiguate a text to a set of classes.

Understanding How Neo4j Cypher Queries are Evaluated

There are many ways to store and manage data within a Neo4j graph database. When Neo4j 2.0 launched late last year we had an entirely new browser experience for interacting with graphs. The graph visualization from the return results of Cypher queries were at the core of the user experience enhancements to the platform.

Using 3D Visualization to Debug a Graph-based Algorithm

Recently I have been working on an idea for an algorithm that discovers patterns in raw streams of data. This pattern recognition algorithm uses deep learning to classify certain combinatorial features that uniquely identify an input stream.

I'm going to first talk a bit about the algorithm so it makes sense as to why visualization is such an important step in iterating and tweaking code that most efficiently implements the algorithm.

The Algorithm

In a previous post I introduce the idea for the algorithm and how a graph-based approach might work.

Hierarchical Pattern Recognition

About a year ago I read about Ray Kurzweil's "Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind", which he articulates in his book, "How to Create a Mind". I picked up the book after struggling with the idea of implementing a deep learning algorithm for parsing natural language text on Wikipedia. My goal was to discover links in volumes of text that were not already linked. I ended up developing all kinds of cool heuristics to do this, mostly by a lot of trial and error. King of these heuristics was a pretty simple algorithm at the core of the library that would find redundancies in batches of text content. 

How this worked is if a phrase was mentioned repeatedly in a collection of about 50 sentences, then I could extract that phrase as a node and link it back to the pieces of content it belonged to. Every now and then you'll get a reference to another article's name, which can then be verified against Wikipedia's site index, which would provide more sentences to find repeated phrases within.

I struggled with persistency because I knew how ugly my problem was for a relational database. I created some entity-relationship models, and implemented them using Entity Framework over Microsoft SQL Server. It worked, kind of. I waited patiently to happen upon a better solution. Thankfully I did, and using a graph database I was able to take my cool little algorithms and solve my persistency problem at scale.

Building a Neo4j Reporting Service Part II

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Author of Sherlock Holmes stories

A Subgraph From Neo4j's Browser

Just as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's character, Sherlock Holmes, manically collects facts and evidence to prove theories, we find ourselves doing much of the same today except on a much larger scale— web scale. The web is an ever growing expanse of facts and evidence. It is at our disposal to observe without much of a challenge, but to store it and retrieve it in a way that answers the big questions, that's challenging.

Continuing on from Building a Graph-based Reporting Platform: Part I, I posed some questions related to understanding how to build great community experiences around Neo4j using Meetup.com for local events. I presented an idea to use Neo4j to build a platform that could help us understand the demand for presenting compelling content at events.

Compelling content is at the core of great community experiences. That content fuels the conversations between people, ideas begin to flow, and innovation is born.

My idea was to build an open-source platform that would poll public APIs, translate collected data into a graph, and store it in a graph database to be analyzed, queried, and visualized over time. The first component of this architecture is the Data Import Scheduler, which this post describes in detail.

Polling Data From Public APIs

Let's start out by answering a basic question.

What does the data import scheduler do?

The analytics data import scheduler is a Node.js process that can be hosted for free on Heroku and is responsible for collecting time-based statistics from a public API. In this case, the Meetup.com REST API exposes a set of methods that provide a momentary snapshot into the number of members that a group has at the time of the request. The data import scheduler polls this endpoint once a day to retrieve Meetup group statistics to later be used for time-based analysis from our graph database, Neo4j.

As illustrated in the diagram below, the Node.js application wakes up once a day and checks in with the Meetup.com REST API.

The scheduler process polls Meetup.com's REST API daily. An HTTP GET request is dispatched for each city we're tracking, returning a JSON formatted response for groups in those cities. The JSON data for each group is then translated into a subgraph, formatted as Neo4j's Cypher query language. The Cypher query is then sent as a transaction to Neo4j and updates a snapshot of the group's stats for that day.

Importing a Meetup Group's Subgraph

The image below is a visualization of a Meetup group's subgraph, translated from JSON data polled on an arbitrary date.

Graph Database - San Francisco on 4/28/2014

We see that the group has a set of topic nodes, which may already exist within the database. The subgraph must be merged into the larger graph without duplicating any nodes. Using Cypher's MERGE clause we can get or create nodes, which is useful for expanding our graph's connected data. Each topic will collect more groups as new subgraphs are merged for daily imports. The same is also true for both day and location nodes.

After a few days of scheduled imports, a group's subgraph begins to take shape. As day nodes are connected to the previous day's node, membership statistics are connected.

A Meetup Group Statistics Subgraph, 4/23 to 4/28

The data import scheduler application is open-source and available on GitHub. Also, full documentation is available to help you get started with customizing your own graph-based reporting platform.

All analysis on the temporal stats collected from the data import scheduler is performed within the REST API module of the reporting platform. It also safely exposes the graph database to a front-end web dashboard, consumed from client-side JavaScript. The REST API uses Swagger, which is a specification and complete framework for describing, producing, consuming, and visualizing RESTful web services.

• Building a Graph-based Reporting Platform: Part I
• Meetup Analytics API Demo
• Meetup Analytics Web Dashboard Demo
• Meetup Reporting GitHub Repository

Building a Neo4j Reporting Service Part I

Data science is pretty hot right now. The obvious reason is that data is rapidly expanding in complexity and size. There is an opportunity to be had in building systems that can capture this data, classify it in multiple dimensions, and to scale it up to the demands of analysts looking to convert data into valuable reports.

As a developer evangelist for Neo4j, I am frequently out in the community talking about things I build using our database. We use Meetup.com to schedule and promote our community events all over the world.

If you're unfamiliar with Meetup.com, here is a description from their Wikipedia entry:

"Meetup is an online social networking portal that facilitates offline group meetings in various localities around the world. Meetup allows members to find and join groups unified by a common interest, such as politics, books, games, movies, health, pets, careers or hobbies. Users enter their postal code or their city and the topic they want to meet about, and the website helps them arrange a place and time to meet. Topic listings are also available for users who only enter a location."

At Neo4j, we're obsessed with data, especially connected data. We believe in our product because we use it to solve our own problems every day. With something like Meetup.com, we found ourselves guessing about many of the aspects of our community and how we could do a better job creating a great community experience.

Some of those questions were:

• How many people will show up to an event from the attendee list?

• What kind of content are people interested in hearing about?

• What's the best location to host our meetups to boost attendance?

I wanted to use Neo4j to do reporting. I decided to put together a platform to track some of this information and build some reports to visualize the data we collected. I started by breaking down the problem into a set of stories to be implemented as a report.

Problem

• Track meetup group growth over time
  
• Apply tags to meetup groups and report combined growth of all groups over time
  

Questions

• Given a start date and an end date, what is the time series that plots the membership growth of a given meetup group?
  
• Given a start date, an end date, and a combination of tags, what is the time series that plots the combined membership growth of all meetup groups with those tags?
  
• How do you generate the JSON data of a time series for a basic JS line chart plugin?
  

I decided to start with a GraphGist, which is an open source project we built to enable our community to put together a quick proof of concept using our database.

Neo4j for Graph Analytics: Meetup.com Example

I designed an example graph data model, which I then translated into Neo4j's Cypher query language to create an example dataset.

Now it was time to scale it up to a full platform. I decided to use Node.js.

There would be three Node.js driven components. One console application for importing data on a schedule and two web applications; a dashboard for displaying reports and REST API to communicate with the Neo4j graph database.

With an architecture in place, I went forward with building out each of the modules.

In my next blog post I will go through the details of building the import scheduler, which polls the Meetup.com API each day and imports the graph data model into Neo4j.

Feel free to take a look at the finished documentation which details the creation of each of the Node.js modules:

Graph-based Reporting Documentation

Also, I put a slide deck together:

Building a Graph-based Reporting Platform from Kenny Bastani

Time Scale Event Meta Model

Time Scale Graph

Recently at the GraphConnect 2013 conference in San Francisco, questions were asked about how to handle temporal or time-based traversals in a Neo4j graph database.

So I decided to write a GraphGist to help Neo4j developers do recommendations by logging events within a "Time Scale Graph".

The goal of this GraphGist is to provide you with a lens to help you see information as simple temporal facts that are captured across space and time.

You can find the full GraphGist here