I've posted the board report for April. On Wed, Apr 3, 2019 at 10:49 AM Stephen Mallette <[email protected]> wrote:
> Here is the attached draft of our board report for this month. After a > somewhat slow end to 2018 with our last report, this 2019 report is full of > good/interesting things. Note that I've addressed the W3C graph query > language working group in this report even though it was discussed a long > time ago. We should have had that in the last report but it was > inadvertently omitted and the board asked for an update in this report. As > usual, I will give this a few days for review before I submit it to the > board. > > --------------------------------------------------------- > > ## Description: > Apache TinkerPop is a graph computing framework for both graph databases > (OLTP) and graph analytic systems (OLAP). > > ## Activity: > TinkerPop just completed the release process for 3.3.6 and 3.4.1. Both > versions contained a few new features, but were largely maintenance > releases > carrying a number of bug fixes. At this time, we are focusing on trying to > release code more often given the big release of 3.4.0 at the start of the > year which took a long time to finalize. We have already started on 3.3.7 > and 3.4.2 and would expect to release those in the next two months or so. > > In addition to the continued work on the 3.x line, early discussion and > exploratory work for TinkerPop 4.x have begun. 4.x contains some major > shifts > in thinking about the project as TinkerPop reinforces and expands upon its > already agnostic nature toward graphs and related technology. > Specifically, > TinkerPop 4.x will look to achieve the following challenging and lofty > goals: > > * Language environment agnosticism so as to not be driven and bound solely > by the Java Virtual Machine. We see this as a logical extension of our > already successful foray into Gremlin Language Variants[1]. > * Data language agnosticism which means that TinkerPop can consume any > query > language alongside Gremlin which we see as a logical extension of the > success > in sparql-gremlin[2] recently released in 3.4.0, but also demonstrated in > a > number of other external projects like cypher-for-gremlin[3], > sql-gremlin[4], > and others. > * Data structure agnosticism which is born of our roots in graph, but can > be > extensible to other data forms like tables, documents and RDF. > * Data processor agnosticism which opens the door to a wider array of data > processing models beyond the either-or choice of real-time (OLTP) and batch > (OLAP). > > In our previous report, we inadvertantly omitted news regarding the W3C > Workshop on Web Standardization for Graph Data[5], which, among other > things, seeks to produce a standard graph query language. The query > language largely under discussion for that position is GQL[6], which is > effectively the Cypher query language driven by Neo4j, a major player in > the > graph database space. > > After some discussion, TinkerPop decided not to participate in the W3C > working group directly. Given our long standing position on technological > agnosticism which continues to expand with each major version, we felt > that > it was not our place to help construct official standards of that sort. The > outcome of that working group may be an ISO standard graph query language, > and if that is the case, TinkerPop will simply "consume" that standard > alongside Gremlin, as we currently do with SPARQL and other languages > previously mentioned. > > The wider TinkerPop community saw some additional growth with two new > graph systems that support the Gremlin query language: > > * ArangoDB[7] - a native multi-model database > * Alibaba Graph Database[8] - a cloud-native graph database service > > The addition of these major graph systems that support TinkerPop brings > the > total number of graphs supporting the Gremlin graph query language to over > two dozen. > > There were a number of talks/papers about TinkerPop, Gremlin and related > projects during this reporting period. Here were some by TinkerPop > committers/PMC members: > > * Introduction to Property Graphs and Gremlin[9] - Harsh Thakkar > * Stream Ring Theory[10] - Marko Rodriguez > > Finally, Jason Plurad (PMC) volunteered to organize a Graph Processing > Track[11] at ApacheCon North America 2019 which will be held in Las Vegas > in September. > > ## Issues: > There are no issues requiring board attention at this time. > > ## Releases: > - 3.3.6 (March 18, 2019) > - 3.4.1 (March 18, 2019) > > ## PMC/Committer: > - Last PMC addition was Jorge Bay-Gondra - October 2018 > - Last committer addition was Harsh Thakkar - August 2018 > > ## Links > > [1] http://tinkerpop.apache.org/docs/3.4.1/reference/#gremlin-variants > [2] http://tinkerpop.apache.org/docs/3.4.1/reference/#sparql-gremlin > [3] https://github.com/opencypher/cypher-for-gremlin > [4] https://github.com/twilmes/sql-gremlin > [5] https://www.w3.org/Data/events/data-ws-2019/ > [6] https://gql.today/ > [7] https://github.com/ArangoDB-Community/arangodb-tinkerpop-provider > [8] https://cn.aliyun.com/product/gdb > [9] > https://www.slideshare.net/harsh9t1/introduction-to-property-graphs-and-gremlin > [10] https://zenodo.org/record/2565243#.XKSvI1VKhEY > [11] > https://groups.google.com/d/msg/gremlin-users/2AvsmBE4ScQ/y98yc3A_AwAJ >
