Compound relationship in neo4j

Question

I'm playing around with neo4j - seeing what I can and can't do with it before suggesting it for something serious. One thing that I'm trying to work out is if you can have what I'm calling a compound relationship.

In my playing, I'm doing a family tree - it seems an ideal fit. I'm wanting to express that a life event occurred between two people - getting married for example - and where it happened. The MARRIED_TO relationship between two PERSON nodes is easy. I'm struggling with the relationship to the PLACE node though.

In my head, it seems that what I really want is a relationship that goes from the PLACE node to the MARRIED_TO relationship, and I don't think that's possible.

Alternatively, I could see the MARRIED_TO relationship going between three nodes, but that not only doesn't feel right but also isn't possible.

The best i can see to do is either have a EVENT node representing the marriage, which feels clunky, or else have relationships from both PERSON nodes to the PLACE, which is then duplication of data.

Is there a proper way of managing this kind of data? Or am I just missing something?

Answer 1

Consider "Marriage" being a vital part of your domain. Anything being an entity deserves a separate node - so "Marriage" (or Event) becomes a node. That node then can be connected to the two people and the location.