Introduction

According to the article Social Data Revolution on Wikipedia, social data can be defined as follows:

"Social data refers to data individuals create that is knowingly and voluntarily shared among them."

Social data platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, are enabling individuals to form groups, share their thoughts, express opinions, and connect with other individuals based on common interests.

In this chapter, we will cover various recipes to mine social data with Neo4j. The scale is very important when it comes to social data, as a graph database can quickly reach billions of nodes and their relationships on hugely popular social networks.

You will learn about common algorithms through the recipes, which you will find helpful while implementing a new social platform or analyzing the output from existing ones.

Before trying our first recipe, let's recap the basics of Cypher query elements:

• START: This is used to denote the starting node in the graph

• MATCH: This is used...