The Practitioner's Guide to Graph Data

Preface

Think about the last time you searched for someone on a social media platform.

What did you look at on the results page?

Most likely, you started scanning down the names in the list of profile results. And you probably spent most of your time inspecting the “shared friends” section to understand how you knew someone.

Our innate human behavior of reasoning about our shared friends on social media is what inspired us to write this book. Though, our shared inspiration generated two very different reasons behind why we wrote this book.

First, have you ever stopped to think about how an app creates the “shared friends” section?

The engineering required to deliver your “shared friends” in search results creates an intricate orchestration of tools and data to solve an extremely complex, distributed problem. We have either built those sections or created the tools that deliver them. Our passion for understanding and teaching others from our collective experiences is the first reason we chose to write this book together.

The second reason is that anyone who uses social media intuitively derives personal context directly from the “shared friends” section. This process of reasoning and thinking about relationships within data is called graph thinking, and that is what we name the human approach to understanding life through connected data.

How did we all learn to do this?

There wasn’t a specific point in time when we all were taught this skill. Processing relationships among people, ...