Hi Rick, As you say, color is just an integer, so all you need is to index the integer (use lucene, or connect all nodes to a node of the right color).
However, since you use the term 'color' I wonder if you are referring to the problem of finding minimal color similarities between related nodes? I mean similar to the problem of coloring adjacent countries on a map with sufficiently different colors to make them visually distinctive. This is a well know graph problem, but in some scenarios a 'plain graph' solution is not ideal. For example, I deal with mobile network frequency planning, where towers (modeled as nodes) need sufficiently different frequencies as to not interfere with nearby towers (with 'nearby' modeled as weighted relationships). There is no perfect solution, but by modeling a cost weight on the relationships, you can apply an iterative optimization algorithm to the graph to find near optimal solutions. If your problem is more like this one, we can discuss it further, probably off-list since this is now rather domain specific :-) Regards, Craig On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 10:06 PM, Rick Otten <[email protected]> wrote: > There are a number of possible applications for coloring a graph. I was > poking around in the neo4j documentation, but did not turn up any examples > or canned routines for this. > > I was imagining finding something like "ColorGraphNodes([color property > name])" which puts a property on each node identifying its color (some > sort of integer) and thus would allow you to then get all nodes of a > similar color. > > Do computer scientists have a different name for a coloring than > mathematicians (ie, am I just looking for the wrong keyword), or is that > something that hasn't really been packaged yet, or maybe it is something > with no good scalable algorithms, and thus is not relevant in the large > graph world, or maybe folks who need it, implement it themselves on a > case-by-case basis? > > I do not have a specific use case in mind at the moment, just a lot of > half baked ideas. > > > -- > Rick Otten > [email protected] > O=='=+ > > > _______________________________________________ > Neo4j mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.neo4j.org/mailman/listinfo/user > _______________________________________________ Neo4j mailing list [email protected] https://lists.neo4j.org/mailman/listinfo/user
