Understanding Options for Building TimeTree in Neo4

Question

Is it possible to construct something like GraphAware's TimeTree using Neo4j's CLI, GraphAware's importer, Michael Hunger's batch import, or with py2neo?

It would be optimal to be able to do this using Neo4j's CLI (in terms of set up). I want to be able to search for a certain kind of node in a range without converting all the date values to timestamps, as encouraged by this post. My data is currently in ISO-8601 format.

I'm not against building a TimeTree from scratch, like what Michael Hunger did in this post. However, I suspect that this is a common issue and would prefer not to rediscover the wheel on this one.

Answer 1

With the GraphAware TimeTree, you are not limited to the rest api. Since version 2.2 you have automatic event attachment configurable in the neo4j.properties file

https://github.com/graphaware/neo4j-timetree/blob/master/README.md#automatic-event-attachment

While this does not remove you the fact that you will need to convert your event times in milliseconds, there are a number of points that will ease your life :

• no need to care about building missing parts of the tree
• if an event is removed and the time node was attached to only one event, this time node will be automatically removed
• this is well tested and in production on high-demand neo4j instances
• supported by neo4j experts

It is worth to give it a try