Modeling data for floor plan

[jacek213]

I'm creating a floor plan with neo4j which is going to be later presented in frontend d3-backed application.

My base label is Floor. Floor has many OutlinePoints (attributes: x, y), which form a floor outline (graphical representation of floor).

(:OutlinePoint)-[:OUTLINES]->(:Floor)

The direction of points must be known in order to properly draw it on the frontend. Because of that I've been considering following solutions:

1. keeping additional order_idx attribute on OutlinePoints and maintaining them on application level, so than when ordered by order_idx we get exact direction of the line.

2. Self referencing relation for OutlinePoints:

   (from:OutlinePoint)-[:CONNECTS]->(to:OutlinePoint)
   

This approach seems logical when working with graph data, however it would be harder to maintain, as outline points are going to come from a front-end creator app and later be returned by REST API. Could it be beneficial in any way compared to solution 1? Also,would it be possible to create a query returning OutlinePoints in proper order?

3. The lazy way - keep outline in serialized attribute as array of (x,y) coordinates. This is probably a wrong way though, because huge attribute values should be avoided.

The same logic later applies to rooms:

(:OutlinePoint)-[:OUTLINES]->(:Room)

Suggestions are more than welcome, as it's my first project with neo4j

[jacek213]

I've done some digging and linked list with pointers seems like a good solution

So, newly introduced Outline node would serve as a pointer.

[mmorley]

Greetings! Couple of thoughts...

Neo4j 3.4 has point spatial capabilities in it. Craig Taverner and Will Lyons did a presentation at Graph Connect in New York that discussed applications including the fact neo4j spatial also allows for cartesian coordinate mapping. The spatial distance functions also support 3d - so you could model the location where a building is as a graph network, and then model the building and everything in it with cartesian coordinates.

https://neo4j.com/docs/developer-manual/current/cypher/functions/spatial/

GitHub

johnymontana/osm-routing-app

Simple React app to demonstrate routing with OpenStreetMap data and Neo4j - johnymontana/osm-routing-app

My sense as well given your description is it might be worth checking out graphQL as a means to address the maintenance issue as it provides a graph like query experience that is considerably more flexible and powerful than the standard rest pattern. We are adding a graphQL endpoint to our application theLink to address the challenges it looks like you are facing on this aspect...

[michael_hunger]

Also there was a presentation from neanex at graphtour AMS on that topic, can't remember how far they went into technical detail:

[jacek213]

Thanks, I didn't know about the spatial features in 3.4, will dive into it.

About graphQL - I've been already thinking about using it 🙂 However I need to do some more research about integration possibilities. The official bridge package (https://github.com/neo4j-graphql/neo4j-graphql) doesn't seem to be maintained, have you used it or done everything by yourself @mmorley? My backend app is written in Ruby and I'm using Neo4j-rb.

Edit:

Also, does anyone have experience with marrying those spatial functions with dijkstra shortest path algorithm (described here https://neo4j.com/docs/graph-algorithms/3.4/algorithms/shortest-path/)? I will need to calculate shortest path between points (which may be located on different floors).

[michael_hunger]

Why do you think the graphql package is not maintained?

You can use the dijkstra and A* functions via apoc or graph algorithms.