Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

June 9, 2012

Graph DBs Kicking Ass: 16 Internet Years Later

Filed under: Graphs,Neo4j — Patrick Durusau @ 7:12 pm

I saw a tweet of Emil Eifrem’s Neo4j or: why graph dbs kick ass from 2008 yesterday.

That’s roughly sixteen (16) years ago in Internet time.

What has changed/stayed the same?

To get you started:

  • Slide 2: “Community Experimentation”

    Has only gotten richer. Approximately 20 graph DB projects, not to mention more specialized graph software.

  • Slide 4: “Trend 1: Data is getting more connected”

    This is a current “big lie” of IT. Users have always seen data as richly connected. Computer representation of connectedness has been and is impoverished. Let’s put the blame where it belongs.

  • Slide 5: “Trend 2: …and more semi-structured”

    Good thing we didn’t have journals, technical papers, newspapers, books, speeches, radio/TV back in the old days. Would have had “semi-structured” data.

  • Slide 6: Performance vs. Information Complexity

    The opposite of “Smiling Bob’s” chart in the Enzyte commercial. It’s a funny chart (in both cases) but more for amusement than serious discussion. (Unless you are an Enzyte customer of course.)

  • Slide 8: Whiteboard friendly?

    I am not sure what Emil has against blackboards. Or non-pictograph writing systems. 😉

  • Slide 11: Food Web of North Atlantic

    If you like food webs, see: Marine Fisheries Food Webs, which is part of the online book: Our Ocean Planet: Oceanography in the 21st Century by Robert Stewart. (Warning: Oceanography isn’t my field. You need to ask a librarian about using this as a source.)

  • Slide 12: A Social Graph

    I would add an STD graph: STD graph

  • Slide 43 Neo4j architecture gotchas
    • Focus on the domain (whiteboard friendly – domain first development)
    • Purpose of the domain layer:
      • “an adaptation of the generic node space to a type-safe, object-oriented abstraction expressed in the vocabulary of our domain.” (!)

    I appreciate the candor but don’t “get” the gotcha?

    How is the domain layer binding/limiting my use of the graph that is created?

    A little larger helping of explanation please.

    (Ah! From slide 14 Shut up and show us the code! to slide 28 Bonus Code: domain model

    Domain model means Nodes, properties, traversals, all hard coded. Yikes! Fortunately, at least for nodes/properties, can update with Cypher)

What else would you update?

Perhaps we need a date property on nodes that represent resources on the Internet?

Any search brings up something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.

Some offer sort by date/relevance and other “facets” but that’s not really the point is it?

I don’t want to do data mining, I want to do data finding. Not the same thing.

Perhaps graphs can capture data already found and preserve it for the next searcher?

Comments/suggestions?

1 Comment

  1. […] Qi4j in part because Emil Eifrem covers it in his “kicking ass” slides on […]

    Pingback by Qi4jâ„¢ « Another Word For It — June 9, 2012 @ 7:17 pm

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