Confused about relationships? Elasticsearch gets graphic

Graph-database-style relationship mapping has been added to an offspring of the Elasticsearch open-source search engine.

Elasticsearch startup Elastic has added Graph capabilities to both the search engine and to the data visualisation plug-in Kibana.

Founded in 2012 to make a business from Elasticsearch, Elastic reckoned that its graphing is superior to the relationship-mapping software of other graph engines.

Graph databases have proved one of the most enduring children of the great NoSQL birth, for their ability to establish connections.

They’ve proved useful to social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Such firms use them to find out who you know in ever-widening circles, to close down the degrees of separation for greater data mapping and mining in the interest of undiscovered business opportunities.

By fusing graph with search, Elastic hopes to combine the power of social with that earlier great online revolution, the revolution that gave us Google: search.

Graph in Elasticsearch establishes relevance by establishing the significance of each relationship versus the global average to return important results.

That’s different to what Elastic called “traditional” relationship mapping, which is based on a count of the frequency of a given relationship.

The company claimed its approach is suited to behavioural analysis such as fraud detection, drug discovery, personalised medicine and recommendations.

Also, according to Elastic, you can use its plug-in in Elasticsearch without needing to first run the data through a big batch-processing engine like Hadoop.

Elasticsearch is an open-source, distributed, multi-tenant capable search server based on Apache’s Lucene and available to all under an Apache licence. Users include Netflix, Soundcloud, StumbleUpon, Mozilla and the Amadeus IT Group.

Graph, however, is an extension of Elastic that will only be available under a subscription model. Elastic’s customers include Facebook, The Daily Mail and The Guardian. ®