Recommendations not only help the end user or consumer, but are a boon for analysts and business managers as well. Using graph databases like Neo4j to create such systems also brings the added advantage of great visualization support through its own web interface as well as several third party tools. Visualization serves two basic purposes which are outlined as follows:

If we consider the example of the dating application earlier, a visual overview can assist in the identification of anomalies or outlier entities. For example, if a person is a trouble seeker and likes to spam other people's profiles, it would show up in the majority of connections being singular. Such cases can be identified and protected against, by using proper visualization method.

There are several tools available that help to visualize graph data. The web interface of Neo4j comes with its own visualization tool, where the results are displayed in the form of a fluid graph interface with dynamic functionality to view the information about specific displayed entities. This is how our complete map graph is visualized in the web interface of Neo4j:

The gephi open source project is also an excellent tool to visualize complex and dynamic graphs. It is a great tool for data analysis and inference and can support a large number of graph sources. However, Linkurious is a project that deserves special mention as it is built with Neo4j in mind. It is a versatile tool, which provides a frontend to most of the graph database operations. Not only does it allow you to visualize and explore the database, it also provides a search functionality to search your graph data without any code (like a Google for graphs). You can even edit entities in the graph from the Linkurious frontend.

Here's what the interface looks like: