Will's Blog Posts

December 04, 2023 • 10 min read

Using aerial imagery and Spatial SQL to explore Forest Service road networks

October 18, 2023 • 20 min read

My take on the exciting world of spatial database technology plus a look at getting started with Apache Sedona.

September 25, 2023 • 13 min read

A look at loading points of interest from the Overture Maps public dataset into the Neo4j graph database, plus writing Spatial SQL queries with AWS Athena.

June 22, 2023 • 13 min read

A resource for working with geospatial data in Neo4j.

January 03, 2023 • 11 min read

Radius Distance, Bounding Box, and Point in Polygon Search With Graphs

September 29, 2021 • 11 min read

Building Interactive Graph Data Visualizations With GraphQL

July 27, 2021 • 12 min read

Using Next.js API Routes And Deploying To Vercel & Neo4j Aura

July 20, 2021 • 11 min read

Using The Flat Data GitHub Action To Import Data From The Lobste.rs News Site

March 21, 2021 • 13 min read

Building A GRANDstack Podcast App: Episode 6

March 21, 2021 • 13 min read

Building A GRANDstack Podcast App: Episode 5

January 24, 2021 • 11 min read

Building A GRANDstack Podcast App: Episode 4

January 09, 2021 • 11 min read

Building A GRANDstack Podcast App: Episode 3

December 11, 2020 • 11 min read

Building A GRANDstack Podcast App: Episode 2

December 06, 2020 • 11 min read

Building A GRANDstack Podcast App: Episode 1

November 28, 2020 • 12 min read

Using low code graph apps to build data visualizations with Neo4j.

November 20, 2020 • 13 min read

Using the new Jolt format with HTTP in Neo4j 4.2 with edge network handlers.

November 28, 2017 • 12 min read

This post explores how to build spatial data visualizations using address data from the Paradise Papers leak of offshore corporations and the people connected to them. First, we geocode all addresses in the leaked data, then build a heatmap and interactive map for exploring the data of offshore legal entities.

November 15, 2017 • 10 min read

Natural language processing (NLP) techniques like entity extraction can be used to help make sense of a large text corpus. In this post we apply named entity resolution to the scraped Russian Twitter Troll tweets to try to get a better understanding of how these trolls were spreading fake news.

November 12, 2017 • 11 min read

In this post we explore how to scrape tweets from Internet Archive for Russian Twitter Troll accounts, import into Neo4j for analysis, and how to build a simple GraphQL API exposing the data through GraphQL.

April 27, 2017 • 13 min read

Many web services are converting their publicly facing APIs from REST to GraphQL. Companies like GitHub and Shopify have been leading this transition to GraphQL. In this post we take a look at how we can query the new Mattermark GraphQL API using Apollo Client, storing the results in Neo4j to then see what we can learn about a local startup ecosystem.

January 30, 2017 • 13 min read

One of the powers of working with graph databases is the ability to combine disparate datasets and query across them. Today we will look at how we can combine the BuzzFeed Trumpworld graph with data about federal government contracts from USASpending.gov, allowing us to examine any government contracts that were awarded to organizations that appear in Trumpworld.

August 09, 2016 • 7 min read

Updating legis-graph-spatial to make use of the new spatial procedures in Neo4j 3.0 and the official Neo4j Javascript driver. Procedures provide a new API for interacting with the Neo4j spatial extension and are callable from Cypher.

June 26, 2016 • 14 min read

Using graphs to analyze character interactions in the popular Game of Thrones series. Social network analysis with Neo4j.

March 21, 2016 • 9 min read

Adding geospatial indexing and map visualizations to legis-graph

January 07, 2016 • 3 min read

Finding real world text datasets to analyze can make playing around with NLP tasks much more interesting. This quick post shows how to build a word adjacency graph in Neo4j using product reviews from the Best Buy API.

December 14, 2015 • 2 min read

A common task when working with data from APIs is crawling the API and inserting the results in a database. In this example we will import data into Neo4j by crawling a public API, building a graph in Neo4j as we go along. We will use Neo4j as a queuing mechanism to store URLs for placeholder resources waiting to be fetched.

October 11, 2015 • 12 min read

This post shows how we can apply graph analytics to US Congressional data to find influential legislators in Congress. Using the Mazerunner open source graph analytics project we are able to use Apache Spark GraphX alongside Neo4j to run the PageRank algorithm on a collaboration graph of US Congress.

September 20, 2015 • 9 min read

Interactions among members of any large organization are naturally a graph, yet the tools we use to analyze data about these organizations often ignore the graphiness of the data and instead map the data into structures (such as relational databases) that make taking advantage of the relationships in the data much more difficult when it comes time to analyze the data. Collaboration networks are a perfect example. So we focus on one of the most powerful collaboration networks in the world, the US Congress.

June 16, 2015 • 13 min read

Discovering paradigmatic word associations is one of the core tasks of Natural Language Processing. In this post we explore a graph based method for mining paradigmatic word associations from a text corpus.

May 28, 2015 • 18 min read

Using article links shared on Twitter to determine user interests, we show how to build a personalized content recommender system to suggest other articles the user might be interested in.

May 11, 2015 • 12 min read

We show how to load data from the Yelp Academic Dataset into Neo4j, then build a webapp to perform geospatial queries on the data and visualize the results on a map.

November 19, 2014 • 3 min read

What have I been doing in Santiago Chile as part of Startup Chile? I share some of my experiences from Startup Chile Generation 11.

October 14, 2014 • 10 min read

GraphConnect is an annual conference for graph database enthusiasts. These are my notes from GraphConnect 2014 in San Francisco.

May 22, 2014 • 7 min read

My experiences during Boulder StartupWeek 2014.

March 13, 2014 • 6 min read

Loading every airport in the world into Neo4j Spatial for the purposes of route finding.

March 13, 2014 • 7 min read

A system for ranking tweets based on user affinity and time decay.

February 14, 2014 • 8 min read

Using data about global militarized interstate disputes (wars) we build some geospatial visualizations to analyze data about war fatalities throughout history.