Graph Abstractions Matter | Ora Lassila

While mathematicians have used graph theory since the 18th century to solve problems, the software patterns for graph data are new to most developers. To enable "mass adoption" of graph technology, we need to establish the right abstractions, access APIs, and data models.

RDF triples, while of paramount importance in establishing RDF graph semantics, are a low-level abstraction, much like using assembly language. For practical and productive “graph programming” we need something different.

Similarly, existing declarative graph query languages (such as SPARQL and Cypher) are not always the best way to access graph data, and sometimes you need a simpler interface (e.g., GraphQL), or even a different approach altogether (e.g., imperative traversals such as with Gremlin).

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Ora Lassila is a Principal Graph Technologist in the Amazon Neptune graph database group. He has a long experience with graphs, graph databases, ontologies, and knowledge representation. He was a co-author of the original RDF specification as well as a co-author of the seminal article on the Semantic Web.

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Presentation slides available at https://www.slideshare.net/slideshows/graph-abstractions-matter-by-ora-lassila/266140641

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