Case Study: World Economic Forum achieves personalized, highly relevant search and unified global-issues insights with Neo4j

World Economic Forum - Customer Case Study

The World Economic Forum, led on digital product design by Scott David, faced a failing search experience and a need for better personalization and mapping of global issues. Their Drupal-based search required excessive manual tagging and couldn’t surface relevant relationships across content, experts and events, so they set out to build a multiplatform search and recommendations capability and transformation maps that show how global issues affect industries and economies.

Working with Neo4j and GraphAware, they implemented a graph-based search and recommendation API built on a global-issues taxonomy modeled as nodes and relationships. Graph traversals now connect content, experts, projects and sessions into a unified metastore, delivering stronger relevance and personalization, revealing multi-degree impacts across issues and reducing manual tagging — while the simplicity of Neo4j/Cypher and a large developer community sped adoption and changed how the organization reasons about its knowledge.

World Economic Forum

Scott David

Director, Information Interaction