graph

Hello everyone,

From the book Thank You for Being Late by Thomas Friedman.

Reid Hoffman and the other founders of LinkedIn initially created a platform to help people tap the value of their professional networks, and developed an infrastructure that could map those relationships up to three degrees. In doing so, they provided the foundation for what would eventually become the world’s largest professional graph.

Our current long-term vision at LinkedIn is to extend this professional graph into an economic graph by digitally manifesting every economic opportunity [i.e., job] in the world (full-time and temporary); the skills required to obtain those opportunities; the profiles for every company in the world offer-ing those opportunities; the professional profiles for every one of the roughly 3.3 billion people in the global workforce; and subsequently overlay the professional knowledge of those individuals and companies onto the “graph” [so that individual professionals could share their expertise and experience with anyone].

Does "graph" mean more or less the same as diagram?

Thank you.

Yes, I think so, but it seems an odd choice of word. A graph (or diagram or chart) can only really be a pictorial representation, that I am aware of, but I imagine the pictorial representation of all these relationships would be very unwieldy indeed, and what is really important is the computer model and stored data that lies behind the graph.

Michael30000 said:

... Does "graph" mean more or less the same as diagram?...

A graph is a specific form of diagram - one which shows a set of points (nodes or vertices) and the links (lines or curves) between them.

I don't see what Friedman had in mind, unless it was a social network diagram. That would be relevant, but it's not what most people would first think of when reading the word graph. See Social network - Wikipedia.

Uncle Jack, Keith, thank you.