What’s new in Hume 2.8: Snapshots, Virtual Relationships, and much more!

GraphAware is proud to announce the 2.8 release of Hume, our graph-powered insights engine. The release adds further unique capabilities to Hume’s knowledge graph visualisation and graph data analysis capabilities. Analysts, data scientists, investigators, and data-savvy business users will profit from these benefits:

• Save permanently the insights you uncovered using Snapshots. With Snapshots, you can pick up your exploration at any time without worrying about changes in data or schema and, eventually, share with other analysts.
• Make graph patterns more evident by shortcutting a long path through a virtual relationship: Hume’s Virtual Relationships let knowledge graph managers and analysts cut through to the essential and avoid the hairball problem.
• Ensure connected data in your organisation even if you must comply with tight security policies: Webhooks make it possible to send data to Orchestra and process it without storing it.
• Many improvements make it smoother to leverage the power of Actions in Hume.

Explore insights at any point - and prove them

Graph exploration is at the core of Hume’s offer for analysts. When exploring relationships in a Knowledge Graph Visualisation, we usually dig deep and return with actionable insights. These insights are based on data and a schema that can be subject to changes. With Snapshots, we can now keep a certain part of the Visualisation for later display. Analysts will save time during exploration and be able to share and prove their insights using Snapshots.

This video shows Snapshots in Hume and their characteristics: after taking a Snapshot, they are easily accessible to continue exploration, even after the schema changed. Groupings and styles can be used.

Simplify the complex

Insights are often described by a pattern that is longer or more complex than a single relationship between two nodes. During exploration this can often lead to connections between nodes that are so dense that they become impossible to analyse - the hairball problem. To facilitate effective exploration, this information is sometimes best represented as a relationship that shortcuts this long pattern.

With version 2.8 Hume introduces Virtual Relationships, which lets Knowledge Graph managers describe “shortcut” relationships that represent longer or multiple patterns in the Schema in Hume.

Analysts can then see virtual relationships in the list of available relationships and enjoy their full power during exploration. This doesn’t only allow an easier administration of patterns but facilitates also a faster and more intuitive exploration without the appearance of the hairball problem.

In this video you can see how Virtual Relationships simplify a complex exploration, how relationships can be specified and custom queries applied to further simplify the drilling down.

Connect to third party applications even smoother

Hume is the place where you can explore data from a wide array of sources. We have long supported connection to third party applications and with version 2.8 we enhance this support through Webhooks. They can be used to integrate applications as data sources directly in Hume Orchestra. It is now easier to set up an extensive ecosystem around Orchestra in a safe manner.

This video demonstrates how to quickly create a Webhook server resource, use it in a workflow in Orchestra and to send messages to the workflow.

Leverage the full power of Actions

Actions are one of Hume’s super powers, enabling analysts and data scientists to tailor their exploration needs to their specific problem statements. With Hume 2.8, Actions have been further enhanced:

• It is now possible to run a global action directly from url parameters.
• The side panel for actions has been enriched through a clear distinction between types of actions, a shortcut for running actions and search capabilities.
• Actions parameters have been improved: it is now possible to ensure validity of parameter type and to pass selected elements from one dropdown to the other.
• During an exploration, the canvas easily gets crowded. To manage these problems, there is an option in global Actions to clear canvas before returning results.

This video illustrates the new search for actions and the option to run them directly from the side panel. It shows the icons for the action return types (e.g. graph, table or preview) and how they can be used for filtering actions in the sidebar.

Further relevant improvements

Along with major changes, each release comes with improvements, bug fixes, minor updates and so on. Some of these include:

• Referencing with uniqueName: Schema classes, relationships and attributes are now referenced with a uniqueName rather than by uuid. The benefit of this change is that re-importing a schema with the same labels will not make links, edges or attributes disappear in visualisations. Styles and actions are also capable of detecting label renaming of classes and relationships and their attributes and will not break during re-import of the schema. Actions can now select all the relationships ( before it was unique per type ).
• Ability to configure if value attribute urls can be clickable: Define if users are able to click on a url or if they can simply view it. This supports compliance with strict security policies.
• Number Types normalisation, NUMBER is now deprecated and will be removed in 3.0, use INTEGER or FLOAT
• States of nodes: In graph actions it is now possible to return states for nodes or links so they can be removed, pinged, highlighted or selected.
• Duplication of Workflow: A workflow can now be duplicated in Orchestra.
• Duplication of Actions: Actions can now be duplicated in the side panel of the Visualisation.

Supercharge Hume’s UX

During the last weeks we have held usability tests in which we scrutinized Hume’s Visualisation for its user friendliness. Thanks to our customers that participated in the tests, we were able to keep improving Hume’s usability. The coming weeks will see new rounds of tests. If you are interested to join and test our tool, please click here.

Further sources of knowledge

For those interested in learning more about how Hume delivers high value solutions, the following resources provide an overview of the spectrum of possibilities.

If you spend lots of time listening to and acting on CDC events, read this post by our CTO Christophe and find out how Hume helps you reduce the effort to a matter of clicks!

[Blog] Neo4j Change Data Capture with GraphAware Hume

If you are interested in phonetic search, have a look at the post by our VP of Engineering, Luanne.

[Blog] Registering a custom analyzer for phonetic search in Neo4j 4