Challenge

Bringing rich data to the masses

CÍVICO aims to be the mobile resource for the citizens of the various markets they serve. Information is crowd-sourced so they can get the most complete view of what’s happening in a city. Users have access to information from big chains to small ‘Mom and Pop’ shops. With all of this data in hand, CÍVICO needed a way to make sense of this highly interrelated data and deliver it to the end-user. They identified Neo4j as the best solution but had no experience with the technology. CÍVICO partnered with GrapheneDB in order to leverage their domain knowledge of Neo4j and help their system grow.

Solutions

Geospatial awareness

For CÍVICO, it is extremely important to know a user’s location in order to provide them with relevant recommendations based on their location. With a Neo4j graph database, CÍVICO can traverse connected data to quickly find locations that are adjacent to the user’s location — something which would be much more difficult and time consuming to achieve in a traditional relational model.

In order to implement this functionality, CÍVICO leveraged GrapheneDB’s knowledge of Neo4j best practices in order to get the best, most performant results. GrapheneDB provided recommendations on how to load the data for best performance, as well as how to best use queries and filters for search.

Results

A strategic partnership

The partnership between CÍVICO and GrapheneDB has taken CÍVICO through product launches in three different key markets and it’s still going strong. CÍVICO is currently the largest crowd-sourced database of city information in Bogota, Colombia, serving over 1.3 million users monthly.