“We want to help the world make sense of data and we think graphs are the best way of doing that.”

That’s the word from Emil Eifrem, CEO of Neo Technology, which makes the open-source Neo4j NoSQL graph database. He’s not talking in terms of RDF-centric solutions, even though he says he’s 100 percent in agreement with the vision of the semantic web and machine readability. “The world is a graph,” Eifrem says, “and RDF is a great way of connecting things. I’m all in agreement there.” The problem, in his opinion, is that execution on the software end there has been lacking.

“This comes down to usability,” he says, and the average developer, he believes, finds the semantic web-oriented tools largely incomprehensible. Eifrem says he’s speaking from real-world experiences, having worked directly with RDF and taught classes on the semantic web layers. Where it took a week to get students up to speed on things like Jena and Sesame, they ‘get’ the property graph and graph databases in half-a-day, he says. Neo4j stores data in nodes connected by directed, typed relationships with properties on both – also known as a property graph.

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Emil Eifrem, CEO of Neo Technology recently opined that graphs offer a new way of thinking. He explains, “Faced with the need to generate ever-greater insight and end-user value, some of the world’s most innovative companies — Google, Facebook, Twitter, Adobe and American Express among them — have turned to graph technologies to tackle the complexity at the heart of their data. To understand how graphs address data complexity, we need first to understand the nature of the complexity itself. In practical terms, data gets more complex as it gets bigger, more semi-structured, and more densely connected.” Read more

Emil Eifrem, founder of Neo4j has written an article for Mashable about the rise of graph databases. He writes, “Until the NOSQL wave hit a few years ago, the least fun part of a project was dealing with its database. Now there are new technologies to keep the adventuresome developer busy. The catch is, most of these post-relational databases, such as MongoDB, Cassandra, and Riak, are designed to handle simple data. However, the most interesting applications deal with a complex, connected world. A new type of database significantly changes the standard direction taken by NOSQL. Graph databases, unlike their NOSQL and relational brethren, are designed for lightning-fast access to complex data found in social networks, recommendation engines and networked systems.” Read more