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Cool graph datasets (beyond Neo4j’s official examples)

The Neo4j getting-started example data page is already a strong mix of story graphs (Movies, Game of Thrones), recommendations, retail, investigations (FinCEN, Panama/Paradise), social, recipes, transit, and IT.

Here are other datasets in the same spirit — ready-to-play, narrative, or “follow the connections” graphs — plus the big public catalogs if you want scale.

More Neo4j-ready examples

These are already modeled for Neo4j (dumps, Cypher loaders, or Browser guides), so they drop in like the official samples:

  • Twitch streamers — streamer–game–viewer graph (neo4j-graph-examples/twitch)
  • ICIJ Offshore Leaks — companies, officers, addresses, jurisdictions; same family as Panama/Paradise
  • Public explorer: https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/
  • Repo: neo4j-graph-examples/icij-offshoreleaks
  • OpenStreetMap / NYC Central Park — geo graph of ways, nodes, amenities (neo4j-graph-examples/openstreetmap)
  • Entity resolution demo — record-linkage graph (neo4j-graph-examples/entity-resolution)
  • William Lyon’s extra packs — Yelp reviews, TrumpWorld org chart, 2016 FEC campaign finance, IoT
  • https://github.com/johnymontana/neo4j-datasets
  • OpenSanctions + Offshore Leaks merge — sanctioned people linked into the ICIJ offshore graph (opensanctions/offshore-graph)
  • Enron email corpus as a graph — ICIJ used this as a Datashare + Neo4j demo (~500k emails). Good for “who talked to whom” path queries
  • NASA knowledge graph — older Browser guide (:play nasa)
  • GraphGists — community models across industries: https://neo4j.com/graphgists
    Quality varies, but lots of odd, specific graphs

Also still useful from the official page if you skipped them: WordNet, Neoflix, football transfers, UK companies + land + donations, FAERS healthcare, London Tube.

Pop culture & story graphs

Same energy as Movies / GoT:

  • Star Wars character interactions (episodes 1–7) — scene co-occurrence
  • https://github.com/evelinag/StarWars-social-network
  • Also bundled in the networkdata R package
  • Les Misérables co-appearance network — Knuth’s classic weighted character graph (easy Gephi/GML download)
  • Shakespeare play networks — character speech/interaction graphs per play
  • Marvel / comic character networks — widely recirculated; look under movie/comic network collections on Harvard Dataverse and networkdata
  • Jazz musicians collaboration network

These are small, visual, and great for community detection, shortest paths, and “who bridges two factions.”

Investigations, money, and power

If FinCEN / Panama clicked:

  • Full ICIJ Offshore Leaks Database — Panama, Paradise, Pandora, Bahamas, etc. Downloadable; ICIJ themselves run it on Neo4j
  • OpenSanctions — PEPs, sanctions, crime lists as entities + relationships. Combine with offshore data
  • US FEC campaign finance (2016 pack above) — donors → committees → candidates
  • Political books co-purchase (polbooks on Netzschleuder) — Amazon “customers also bought” among political titles. Tiny and famous
  • Signed trust networks — Bitcoin OTC/Alpha, Slashdot friend/foe, Epinions (SNAP). Positive/negative edges are fun for balance theory

Places, systems, and “how the world is wired”

  • OSMnx / global urban street networks — GraphML for thousands of cities (Harvard Dataverse). Same idea as the London Tube example, but worldwide
  • OpenStreetMap extracts — any city as a routing / amenity graph
  • Airport / air-travel reachability — SNAP “reachability” plus several Netzschleuder airport graphs
  • US / European power grids — Network Repository and SNAP road/power graphs
  • Yelp Open Dataset — businesses, users, reviews, friends (large; Lyon has a Neo4j cut)
  • Last.fm / HetRec — users–artists–tags (Neo4j GDS client also ships a LastFM hetero graph)
  • Product Space / Atlas of Economic Complexity — products linked by export similarity. Beautiful “what does this country make next?” graph
  • Food webs — Florida Bay, New Zealand streams, etc. (Netzschleuder fresh_webs, SNAP Florida Bay)
  • C. elegans connectome — 131 neurons, spatial coordinates. Smallest “real brain” people actually query

Classic network-science catalogs

When you want lots of graphs rather than one polished demo:

Collection What you get Link
SNAP Social, citations, co-authorship, web, Amazon co-purchase, roads, Wikipedia talk/votes, temporal, signed https://snap.stanford.edu/data
Netzschleuder ~286 curated datasets, many formats (GraphML/GML/CSV), good metadata https://networks.skewed.de
Network Repository Thousands of graphs + in-browser viz https://networkrepository.com
KONECT 1,000+ networks, stats and plots http://konect.cc
ICON Index of Complex Networks (discovery index) University of Colorado / Clauset group
networkdata (R) 987 datasets / 2,260 networks: animals, covert orgs, tennis, Star Wars, movies https://schochastics.github.io/networkdata/
Gephi sample pack Les Mis, internet AS, Hypertext 2009 contacts, jazz, school friendships https://docs.gephi.org/desktop/User_Manual/Datasets
Awesome Graph Datasets Typed list: plain, attributed, bipartite, text-attributed, temporal https://github.com/HKBU-LAGAS/Awesome-Graph-Datasets

SNAP highlights that feel “cool” rather than just large: ego-Facebook circles, wiki-Vote, Higgs Twitter, Amazon co-purchase, ca-HepTh / CondMat collaborations, soc-Pokec, LiveJournal.

Knowledge graphs and ML-scale

  • WordNet — already on the Neo4j demo server
  • Wikidata / ogbl-wikikg2 and WikiKG90M — entity–relation–entity triples at serious scale (Open Graph Benchmark)
  • ogbn-mag / MAG240M — papers, authors, institutions, fields (Microsoft Academic Graph slice)
  • ogbl-biokg / BioSNAP — drugs, diseases, proteins, side effects
  • Cora / CiteSeer / PubMed — citation + bag-of-words features; Neo4j GDS client can load Cora and Karate Club directly
  • ogbn-products — Amazon co-purchase with category labels (~2.4M nodes)
  • Wikipedia hyperlink graph — English wiki page–page links (SNAP enwiki-2013 or dedicated Wikipedia-as-Neo4j projects)

OGB portal: https://ogb.stanford.edu

Practical load path into Neo4j

  1. Prefer official dumps / :guide datasets when you want a model + queries already written.
  2. For SNAP / Netzschleuder / Network Repository: download edge lists or GraphML → LOAD CSV or apoc.import.graphml.
  3. For OSM: neo4j-graph-examples/openstreetmap or export via OSMnx to GraphML.
  4. For ICIJ / OpenSanctions: start with their CSVs or the existing Neo4j example repos rather than scraping the live sites.
  5. Watch size. Stack Overflow full dump and WikiKG/MAG240M need real RAM; Movies/GoT/Karate/Les Mis/POLE do not.