BIIIG : Enabling Business Intelligence with Integrated Instance Graphs by André Petermann, Martin Junghanns, Robert Müller, Erhard Rahm.
Abstract:
We propose a new graph-based framework for business intelligence called BIIIG supporting the flexible evaluation of relationships between data instances. It builds on the broad availability of interconnected objects in existing business information systems. Our approach extracts such interconnected data from multiple sources and integrates them into an integrated instance graph. To support specific analytic goals, we extract subgraphs from this integrated instance graph representing executed business activities with all their data traces and involved master data. We provide an overview of the BIIIG approach and describe its main steps. We also present initial results from an evaluation with real ERP data.
Very interesting paper because on one hand it talks about merging data from heterogeneous data sets and at the same time claims to be using Neo4j.
In case you didn’t know, Neo4j enforces normalization and doesn’t have a concept of merging nodes. (True, Cypher has a “merge” operator but it doesn’t “merge” nodes in any meaningful sense of the word. Either a node is matched or a new node is created. Not how I interpret “merge.”)
It took more than one read but in puzzling over:
For integrated objects we can merge the properties from the sources. For the example in Fig. 2, we can combine employees objects with
CIT.employees.erp_empl_number = ERP.EmplyeeTable.numberand merge their properties from both sources (name, degree, dob, address, phone).
I realized the authors were producing a series of graphs where only the final version of the graph has the “merged” nodes. If you notice, the nodes are created first and then populated with associations, which resolves the question of using different pointers from the original sources.
The authors also point out that Neo4j cannot manage sets of graphs. I had overlooked that point. That is a fairly severe limitation.
Do spend some time at the Database Group Leipzig. There are several other recent papers that look very interesting.