Making the transition from tabular to graph data

To introduce the power of a graph data model, we will first focus on using a real social media dataset, from Facebook. This open source data contains information on Facebook pages, their name, and the type of page. Four types of pages are included, namely those for TV shows, companies, politicians, and governmental organizations. In addition, we have data on mutual likes between pages. If two pages like each other on Facebook, this is represented in our data.

It is at this stage that we can start to consider how best to model this dataset. To assemble a graph, we know from Chapter 1, Introducing Graphs in the Real World, that we need to have things represented by nodes, and relationships between those nodes represented by edges.

In the upcoming sections, we will look at examining data, thoughts, and considerations when designing efficient and effective schemas, and then we will get on to implementing the model in Python. Let’...