Collapse Relationships Neo4j?

Question

Is it possible to "collapse" relationships in neo4j? I'm trying to graph relationships between people, and they can be related in multiple different ways - a shared course, jointly authored paper, RT or tweet mention. Right now I'm modeling people, courses, papers, and tweets all as nodes. But what I'm really interested in is modeling the person-person relationships that go through these intermediary nodes. Is it possible to graph the implicit relationship (person-course-person) explicit (person-person), while still keeping the course as a node? Something like this http://catalhoyuk.stanford.edu/network/teams/ - slide 2 and 3.

Any other data modeling suggestions welcome as well.

Answer 1

Yes, you can do it. The query

MATCH(a:Person)-->(:Course)<--(b:Person)
CREATE (a)-[:IMPLICIT_RELATIONSHIP]->(b)

will crate a relationship with type :IMPLICIT_RELATIONSHIP between all people that are related to the same course. But probably you don't need it since you can transverse from a to b and from b to a without this extra and not necessary relationship. Also if you want a virtual relationship at query time to use in a projection you can use the APOC procedure apoc.create.vRelationship.

The APOC procedures docs says:

Virtual Nodes and Relationships don’t exist in the graph, they are only returned to the UI/user for representing a graph projection. They can be visualized or processed otherwise. Please note that they have negative id’s.