Description
The main aim during my internship with the Ditchley Foundation was to work with the graphing database Neo4j and software NeoDash, both of which utilise the graph query language Cypher. As my host organisation initiates events which are invite-only, the specific question I wanted to investigate was “Does Ditchley invite individuals recommended by other contacts?” I chose this in order to begin to develop an attendance prediction model for my final individual project. Neo4j was particularly useful for demonstrating specific parts of the database as a knowledge graph, allowing me to visualise my code and its output. My topic of investigation required me to mainly look at the ‘Contact’ and ‘Conversation’ nodes, with the ‘recommends_person’ relationship, where I carried out numerous codes in order to notice general patterns within the data; for example, success and attendance rates of different types of events hosted at Ditchley (virtual, hybrid, conference, dinner, etc.) or which gatherings generated the most ideas from the attendees. In general, such research is cruical for organisations alike Ditchley, as it could be used for pattern recognition within their databases, bringing out suggested persons for events, or enlarging it overall. Furthermore, it will enrich future events by ensuring higher participation rates, thus circulating more ideas and diversifying current partakers.
