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TigerGraph Graph Database

Event: Connecting the dots with the TigerGraph graph database

Reflections on Graph Analytics at the 7th annual Australian Government Data Summit

by Terry Goodman, Founder of Intech Solutions

It’s frustrating when someone says, ‘I guess you had to be there’, isn’t it? It should be possible to connect the dots of a particular circumstance or situation without having to experience it directly. That’s what the data analytics business is all about, after all.

 

This is something I reflected on at the 7th Annual Australian Government Data Summit, held in Canberra over three days in March 2021. The summit was an opportunity for data analysts, risk and fraud managers, and others from a wide variety of organisations to learn and understand more about the governments’ current data management and open access reforms.

 

As a keynote speaker for this conference, I presented alongside representatives from various Federal, State and Local Government agencies. It was certainly a highly engaging and thought-provoking few days, with much discussion and interaction with the sector on “unlocking the power of data to make informed policy decisions and successfully deliver services”, as was the theme.

 

For me, it was especially exciting as this was one of the first opportunities that Intech has had to publicly present a compelling case study about our newly adopted delivery platform for graph database analytics, known as TigerGraph, and its potential to be a key solution for investigations, compliance, and financial fraud detection. (See below for more about this project with the Australian Tax Office.) 

 

While you did perhaps have to be at this conference to fully appreciate my excitement about just how significant a technology the graph database is, I’m not just going to say, ‘You had to be there’. The following overview will help connect the dots, and ultimately provide a clear picture of what graph analytics is, and what is possible to achieve with it through TigerGraph.  

 

What is graph analytics?

 

Put simply, graph analytics is a set of analytic techniques that allows for the exploration of relationships between data points – or ‘entities of interest’ as we call them – be they relating to organisations, people or transactions.

 

Graph databases are used to efficiently find similar profiles of these entities, uncover their hidden connections, detect ‘communities’ amongst them, and find the most influential users or customers. They can even be utilised to recommend the next best action, once the hidden connections have been made – and make it easy to visualise the graph data. 

 

Think about what it’s like to engage with data on social media platforms such as Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. They all depend on graph databases to do what they do!

 

Use of graph analytics is expected to grow significantly in the next few years as organisations – governments especially – increase their need to ask complex questions across complex data sets in ways which are not always practical or even possible at scale using SQL queries.

 

In fact, Gartner estimates that the application of graph processing and graph database management systems will grow at 100 percent annually through 2022, “to continuously accelerate data preparation and enable more complex and adaptive data science.” (https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner-top-10-data-analytics-trends/) 

Here’s where TigerGraph comes into the picture, both for Intech Solutions, and for you. 

 

What is TigerGraph, and what can it do? 

 

In 2019, the Tax Avoidance Taskforce at the Australian Tax Office (ATO) launched a project called ANGIE (Automated Network & Grouping Identification Engine).

 

This project’s aim was to more easily identify multinationals, large public and private businesses, and associated individuals who were avoiding tax. The ATO awarded the contract for the project to Intech Solutions, based on our recommended use of TigerGraph software.

 

As one of the fastest database / analytics platforms available globally today, TigerGraph is built to provide deep, and ultra-fast, analyses of large datasets – all in real time. Its scalable graph database provides analytics tools that are easy to use, even for the non-technical user, delivering powerful solutions for every level of enterprise.

 

You can read more about the ANGIE project and our work with the Australian Tax Office here: https://www.itnews.com.au/news/the-ato-is-building-a-big-data-platform-to-tackle-tax-evasion-539616), but what is clear is that regardless of the size or complexity of a dataset, TigerGraph’s superior parallel processing power can tackle it to deliver all the benefits that graph analytics promises. 

 

We’re looking forward to the coming years and seeing what more we can do to connect the dots for enterprises across Australia and New Zealand with TigerGraph. Contact us today to see if your project would benefit from a graph analytics approach with Intech Solutions. 

 

Terry Goodman

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Intech provides data solutions that lay a secure foundation for robust, cost-effective and timely business transformation. Intech’s products have been successfully deployed to thousands of users, across hundreds of sites. See intechsolutions.com.au

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