Nodes and edges

The jargon is simpler than it sounds. In your event's graph, a node might be "Julie Martin", "Acme Group", "Booth 4B12", or "Tuesday keynote". The edges are what connect them: Julie works at Acme, visited booth 4B12, attended the keynote, and accepted a meeting with an exhibitor. Why should an organizer care about the vocabulary? Because the edges are where the commercial value lives. A competitor can copy your exhibitor list — the nodes — but they can't copy who met whom, who returned, and who scanned what across five editions. Every badge scan and accepted meeting request at your show is a new edge being written, which is a useful way to think about what onsite data capture is actually for. Understanding the model also helps you ask better questions of your tools: recommendations, lookalike audiences, and "people who visited this booth also visited" features are all just walks along edges. The honest nuance: not all edges are equal. A meeting accepted last month says more than a badge scan from three years ago, so good systems weight edges by type and recency. Treat every connection identically and your matchmaking drifts toward stale.