Tinkering With Neo4j and Cypher

I am so bored of tech at the moment — I just wish I could pluck up the courage to go into the garden and start working on it again (it was, after all, one of the reasons for buying the house we’ve been in for several years now, and months go by without me setting foot into it; for the third year in a row the apples and pears have gone to rot, except for the ones the neighbours go scrumping for…) Instead, I sit all day, every day, in front of a screen, hacking at a keyboard… and I f*****g hate it…

Anyway… here’s some of the stuff that I’ve been playing with yesterday and today, in part prompted by a tweet doing the rounds again on:

#Software #Analytics with #Jupyter notebooks using a prefilled #Neo4j database running on #MyBinder by @softvisresearch
Created with building blocks from @feststelltaste and @psychemedia
#knowledgegraph #softwaredevelopment
https://github.com/softvis-research/BeLL

Impact.

Yeah:-)

Anyway… It prompted me to revisit my binder-neo4j repo that demos how to launch a neo4j database in a MyBinder container tp provide some more baby steps ways in to actually getting started running queries.

So yesterday I added in a third party cypher kernel to the build, HelgeCPH/cypher_kernel that lets you write cypher queries in code cells; and today I hacked together some simple magic — innovationOUtside/cypher_magic — that lets you write cypher queries in block magic cells in a “normal” (python kernel) notebook. This magic really should be extended a bit more eg to allow connections to arbitrary neo4j databases, and perhaps crib from the cypher_kernel to include graph conversions to a networkx graph object format as well as graphical vidusalisations.

The cypher-kernel uses visjs, as does an earlier cypher magic that appears to have rotted (ipython-cypher). But if we can get the graph objects into a nx format, then we could also use netwulf to make pretty diagrams…

The tweet-linked repo also looks interesting (although I don’t speak German at all, so, erm…); there may be things I can also pull out of there to add to my binder-neo4j repo, although I may need to rethink that: the binder-neo4j repo had started out as a minimal template repo for just getting started with neo4j in MyBinder/repo2docker. But it’s started creeping… Maybe I should pare it back again, install the magic from its own repo, and but the demos in a more disposable place.