Developer Tools

16 Ideas of Graph Visualization / Graph Databases Usages

I’m passionate about devtool and data visualization for a long time. I’m regularly giving trials to new tools in the mission to improve my productivity; I’m also creating some tools by myself (assh, depviz, wookie ADN solver, etc.)

There is a sub-topic where I’m more consuming external tools than producing ones: graph visualization; which contains itself some sub-topics: graph databases, graph optimizations, social graphs, real-time graph, graph UI, etc.

For about a week now, thinking (again) about ”how to represent a complex system”, and more precisely: ”how to make a collaborative tool that allows to defining, viewing and analyzing an unstructured, complex, evolutive, and living system.”

For now, I’m mostly reading articles and PoCing, from what I can see, there are a lot (maybe too much) of different existing solutions that handle every part I would need for the final solution.

Problems to address

• how to store the data
• how to programmatically inject and edit data
• how to manually inject and edit data
• how to generate code based on the model definitions
• how to visualize easily / navigate
• how to perform queries
• how to create real-time dashboards
• …

My plan is now to give a more in-depth look at my favorite options. In this intention, I listed 10 (actually 11) ideas of usages that are easier to implement than my target.

Usages for myself

1. Visualize GitHub issues relationships – dependencies, author, people working on, people commenting out, project & organization hierarchy, milestone grouping, labels tagging, etc.
2. Visualize Git code/PRs/Commits – similar to GitHub issues above, but based on code instead of issues: code, files, languages, author, PRs, commits, etc.
3. Define and visualize IT architecture (intermediary milestone to my target) – host, container, ports, cluster, dependencies, Datacenter, process, developers, product, etc.
4. Personal CRM – maintain a wiki about my relationships (people and company), visualize my social graph, etc.
5. Blog content relationship – analyze content based on multiple criteria (keywords, tags, labels, label’s metadata, etc.) to analyze what I talk most, and generate better “related posts” suggestions.
6. Cross-service social graph – create aggregators to visualize people, groups, the friends of friends, followers, followed, etc.
7. Real-time monitoring – define services hierarchically and then write probs that to monitor the health
8. Service/Application comparison based on features and other attributes
9. My GitHub stats; repos, organizations, languages, libraries, metadata, CI used, followers, custom flags (more than 1000 commits, edited < 1 year ago, has a Dockerfile, contributors, etc.).
10. Log parser to analyze user agent to endpoint (real-time dependency) – https://link.medium.com/rSLv1KGPnU
11. P2P network efficiency analysis

Bonus: usages for friends

1. PayFit: engine rules visualization
2. Doctrine: analysis of legal case relationships
3. Zenly: social graph, party recommendation
4. Sounds.am: social graph, friend/playlist/artist/song recommendations
5. Scaleway: visualize relationships between image / volume / volume layer / server entities

PS: about 1 year ago, I forced myself to list “10 something” every morning for a month. Writing this blog post motivated me to retry the experience and share some outputs in the form of small articles on this blog.