Why Ogma is a great match for Linkurious enterprise

Our flagship solution, Linkurious Enterprise, is a web-based platform that leverages the power of graphs and graph visualization to help companies and governments around the world fight financial crime.

One of the main features of Linkurious Enterprise is a user-friendly graph visualization interface aimed at non-technical users. This interface is powered by Ogma, Linkurious’ own JavaScript graph visualization library.

In the latest Linkurious Enterprise 2.9 release we introduced the plugin feature. With plugins, anyone can extend Linkurious Enterprise with the addition of new functionalities. In this article, we will explain how these plugins make it possible to use Ogma to extend Linkurious Enterprise.

A Linkurious Enterprise plugin ranges anywhere between a simple static web page to a full-blown web application, separate from, but stored and served by Linkurious Enterprise. Picture it as the ability for Linkurious Enterprise to serve web pages that are not part of the current Linkurious Enterprise UI, coupled with the ability to run custom business logic on the backend, including talking to other third party services through APIs. Such an application can be opened through a direct link or in the context of a specific visualization using a Custom Action.

Plugins make it possible to improve and adapt business workflows in Linkurious Enterprise with bespoken actions within the Linkurious interface. It only requires the development of a tiny module – the plugin – that does exactly one thing, and this new capability becomes seamlessly available in Linkurious Enterprise.

Creating a plugin for Linkurious Enterprise is straightforward, as the only mandatory requirement is to have some information, such as the name of the plugin, version, and where to find the page to display when the plugin is invoked. For the full details on how to create a plugin, contact us.

In this specific scenario we are focusing on Ogma. We will build the Front End part of a Plugin, without defining any custom API / back end logic. The plugin allows us to use Ogma to build a graph visualization interface that’s different from the Linkurious Enterprise UI. More complex integrations can be achieved using Linkurious Enterprise APIs.

Both Linkurious Enterprise and Ogma are using the same graph data format, making the integration with the Linkurious Enterprise REST API even easier!

This is an overview of the final architecture:

What are some ideas for an Ogma plugin in Linkurious Enterprise? Here are a few ideas that we’ve already heard from our customers:

(1) A Visual Query plugin that would make it possible to visually create a graph pattern without having to learn a graph query language, reducing the learning curve of how to query a graph database!

The plugin could leverage the Linkurious Enterprise API to save and share the newly created query across all users.

(2) A plugin to load a CSV and add its content to an existing visualization. The user could activate the plugin from the Linkurious Enterprise interface and land on a plugin page where it would be possible to load an Excel file. The new information would then be visualized in the Ogma-powered plugin, together, with the data that’s already stored within Linkurious Enterprise.

The new information available could lead to new insights. And, if the new information is relevant, it could potentially be fed into the underlying graph database using the Linkurious Enterprise API to create nodes and edges via the plugin.

(3) A plugin that would group nodes based on their characteristics: sometimes as the number of nodes and relationships in a visualization grows, it becomes complex to appreciate the big picture. What if it was possible to group the nodes based on their commonalities to have a simplified view of the situation? This is one example of a capability that is available in Ogma but not available in Linkurious Enterprise yet. A user could start a plugin and leverage Ogma’s visual clustering to see their data from a different perspective.

Please note these plugins only serve as inspiration for future plugin development and are not readily available in Linkurious Enterprise. For more information on how you can leverage Ogma-powered plugins in Linkurious Enterprise, feel free to contact us!