How to handle dates in neo4j

Question

I\'m an historian of medieval history and I\'m trying to code networks between kings, dukes, popes etc. over a period of time of about 50 years (from 1220 to 1270) in mediev

Answer 1

Another option for dates that keeps the number of nodes/properties you create fairly low is a linked list years (earliest year of interest - latest year), one of months (1-12), and one of dates in a month (1-31). Then every "event" in your graph can be connected to a year, month, and day. This way you don't have to create a new node for every new combination of a year month and day. You just have a single set of months, one of days, and one year. I scale the numbers to make manipulating them easier like so

Years are yyyy*10000

Months are mm*100

Date are dd

so if you run a query such as

match (event)-[:happened]->(t:time) 
with event,sum(t.num) as date 
return event.name,date
order by date

You will get a list of all events in chronological order with dates like Janurary 17th, 1904 appearing as 19040117 (yyyymmdd format)

Further, since these are linked lists where, for example, ...-(t0:time {num:19040000})-[:precedes]->(t1:time {num:19050000})-... ordering is built into the nodes too.

This is, so far, how I have liked to do my event dating