Graphs4Good: Connected Data for a Better World
You’re reading this because of a napkin.
It was the year 2000, and I was on a flight to Mumbai. Peter, Johan, and I had been building an enterprise content management system (ECM) but kept running up against the challenge of using an RDBMS for querying connected data.
That’s when an idea struck. I grabbed a napkin and quickly sketched the first property graph model. Together, we used the idea on that napkin to create the world’s first graph database: Neo4j.
What I couldn’t have possibly imagined was the worldwide impact that tiny back-of-the-napkin sketch would create. There’s been a huge business impact to be sure, but there’s also been a steadily growing and (up to this point) quiet impact outside of bottom-line considerations.
Collectively, the Neo4j community has been using graph technology to solve some of society’s most pressing problems: climate change, curing cancer, advancing women, money laundering, and pushing the boundaries of human knowledge.
Whether they’re working at non-profits, government agencies, newsrooms or research labs, these changemakers are working countless hours to make the world a better place. Sometimes they’re individuals and sometimes they’re disparate global teams, but they’re all working against strong headwinds with limited resources and tight (or non-existent) budgets.
Yet, they persist in their work — investigating shady connections, unwinding tangled webs of illegal activity, modeling the molecules that wreak havoc on the human body (alongside those that heal it), and mapping our course to the stars.
Here and there, you may have heard of some of their projects, but as a whole, they’ve gone unsung. Today, that changes.
Neo4j‘s company vision is to help the world make sense of data. But building a graph database (and other graph technology products) is only a part of bringing that vision into reality.
I believe a key pillar of that vision is connecting and enabling those who work with data so they’re more effective. And that’s precisely why we’re launching the Graphs4Good program.
This new program aims to showcase — and then support, encourage and connect others to — graph-powered projects that effect positive social change, uphold democratic principles, and take on some of the world’s toughest challenges.
While we’re officially launching Graphs4Good today (at GraphConnect 2018), the success of these projects – and the support that Neo4j has given them – has already been ongoing for many years. Let me tell you some of their stories.
This all starts with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). In 2015, they started their groundbreaking work with Neo4j and graph visualization tool Linkurious for their work on the Swiss Leaks story — a look into the secretive and shady world of Swiss private banking.
From there, they shook the world with the largest data leak in recorded history: The Panama Papers. The leak of 11.5 million documents — around 2.6 Terabytes — from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca recorded 40 years’ worth of transactions, accounts, and intricate webs of shell companies from some of the world’s biggest names.
The subsequent reporting exposed the fraud, tax evasion, money laundering, and evasion of international sanctions (along with other illicit activities) among national leaders and celebrities across more than 45 countries. In sum, reporters at 100 news media outlets working in 25 languages used the leaked documents to expose corruption.
Their hard work would eventually win them a Pulitzer Prize, but none of this would have been possible without an accessible model of connected data.
A year later, the ICIJ released the Paradise Papers: a 13.5-million-document, 1.4-Terabyte leak from Appleby and Asiaciti Trust.
