Case Study: American Enterprise Institute achieves agile open-source intelligence and seamless data integration with Neo4j

American Enterprise Institute - Customer Case Study

The Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute collects open‑source intelligence from the internet and social media to analyze events, people and networks in conflict zones. Their challenge was ingesting and unifying vast, heterogeneous and legacy datasets into a single, analyst‑friendly interface while remaining flexible to changing ontologies and fast network traversals.

They implemented Neo4j as the backend graph database, which made it easy to import disparate structured and unstructured sources, add new labels without costly reindexing, and traverse relationships quickly. The result is a stable, low‑maintenance system used by 40–50 analysts with 8–9 million nodes for over a year, and it now also powers their website and visualizations—improving access to insight and enabling rapid, dynamic analysis.

American Enterprise Institute

Frederick Kagan

Director of the Critical Threats Project