Using neo4j for managing project tasks and schedules?

Question

I am considering using Neo4j to manage project tasks and schedules and compute critical paths. Obviously tasks and milestones would be nodes, and dependencies would be relationships. Are there any best practices, resources, or implementations to which I can refer?

Answer 1

In general your approach sounds reasonable and should be quite straightforward. Unfortunately there are few public references.

Some tips for the modeling:

• make sure to use index lookups to create unique entries for project, task and milestone nodes (using your domain ID's)
• put all data you have in the graph (also relationships) -> rich, interconnected data pays off later
• try to whiteboard the domain with your business user, it maps mostly 1:1 to the graph-model
• put some sample data in using one of the API's (Java, REST, Spring Data Neo4j, Ruby, etc) and then visualize it with web-admin or neoclipse and see if there are concepts or data missing
• create some conceptual cypher queries for typical use-cases and see if they are expressive enough for your domain

Answer 2

Maybe this project is interesting to have a look at: https://github.com/xan/NeoProjectManager