Tuesday 3 August 2010

Visualisation of a Neo4J database with Gephi

1.  Get the version of Gephi app that can read neo4j databases (not the main one)
bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~bujacik/gephi/support-for-neo4j

2. Get Netbeans, open the project you've just downloaded and build it as a Mac application (you'll find it in a folder called dist). As it happens, Netbean is quite a lovely python IDE, once you've added a few plugins. I added a python plugin, a regular expression one and found I could pretty much use the python debugger out of the box (more than I can say for Eclipse) and watch variables etc. Very nice.

3. Run the code from yesterday and open the DB that gets created with Gephi... alter the layouts and you get something like this...


... which was a small crawl of a small site (showing IDs).

I have no absolutely no idea what this all means but isn't it lovely to look at? I think I'm onto something.

2 comments:

  1. Awesome!

    You can even display labels and other fun stuff once you get into the configuration of Gephi. Very cool!

    /peter

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  2. I realised the only other data I could use as a label was the page's URL, which made a right mess. I will probably fish out the page TITLE tag and use at least the first 20 characters of that.

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