I have been researching a problems and trying to figure out how suitable
Neo 4J would be to solve it.
The problem is the representation of legal documents. The reason for
considering Neo 4J is that the citations within court opinions form
directed graphs. A citation from one document to another forms a
relationship. That relationship can be refined by giving a legal issue (A
cites B for C)---in fact the issues could be represented by a graph as well.
The process of legal research usually starts with text searching. After
identifying matches, the research process switches to network analysis. If
X is found to be match for research purposes through searching, the set of
documents that cite X or are cited by X are likely to contain matches as
well. Currently, network analysis is done manually and is very tedious.
A single court opinion usually has many citations for a number of different
issues.
That part of the problem appears to match Neo4j well.
The part that I am not certain about is handling the textual nature of the
source.
A document needs to be text searchable.
A document can be huge (some, thousands of pages). A court opinion can
range from one word ("Affirmed.") to tens of pages.
A document is more than plain text. It will include formatting. The
document may include figures or tables.
The document needs to be exportable (e.g., conversion to Word)
The document may have layers of metadata. For example, one might one to
identify judges referenced in the text.
A citation relationship is from a specific point in the text of one
document to a specific point in another document (e.g., page, paragraph,
section--possibly a sentence could be identified).
The current trend is to us XML for this kind of representation but, IMHO,
this is not an effective solution.
My question then is how effective would Neo4J be for this kind of problem.
How might one approach storing large bodies of text?
I know this is a large question (and would get spiked on SO). Maybe there
is something to point to. I guess you could call this large document
representation in Neo 4J.
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