The text discusses a common situation in Neo4j, where there are large volumes of data across an entire customer base and only specific subgraphs of interest are relevant. To visualize this local part of the network, an analytical overlay is created on top of the graph to compute attributes such as total net trading volume from a given company and distance from A to the company in question. The overlay approach has several advantages over a simple approach, including not modifying the underlying graph, expressing metadata about the analysis, and easily pulling together the entire subgraph by traversing only one relationship. This allows for dynamic addition of different analyses in real-time and enables building standard BI visualizations on top of the data. The techniques described are beneficial for "schema-flexible" graph data modeling and Neo4j's relationship-oriented approach, making it easier to adapt these techniques to various problems.