Thanks Owen. Yet another very interesting development that I had completely missed. From the introductory papers it seems to me the primary advantage is in what they call semi-structured data. (At least that's what the "KNOWS" examples in the two tutorial-level papers seem to illustrate.) Basically KNOWS is a relation -- either a link in their ontology or a table in a traditional relational DB. The attributes that hang off it and the attributes that hang off the entities being related are much more open-ended than in a traditional Relational DBMS.
But they give up SQL in the process. Now, I've always thought SQL was ugly. But at least its declarative. Their substitute consists of Java methods that facilitate navigating around their database. So agents aren't going to be writing new navigational methods. Perhaps everything can be raised to a sufficiently abstract level that new navigational methods aren't needed. I guess that's to be seen. Since my model will certainly be network-oriented, Neo4j may be a good choice for a way to store and manipulate it. I actually hadn't begun to consider how the network should be stored. I figured that nodes would be just linked together somehow. And I hadn't thought about persistence at all! So Neo4j answers questions I hadn't begun to ask. Thanks. -- Russ On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 10:44 AM, Owen Densmore <[email protected]> wrote: > Folks: This is an OK talk on neo4j & graph dbs: > http://www.scribd.com/doc/17062895/Neo4j-The-Benefits-of-Graph-Databases > Here's the pdf in case you find scribd as annoying as I do! > http://backspaces.net/temp/Neo4jTalk.pdf > > -- Owen > > > > On Aug 25, 2009, at 6:29 PM, Owen Densmore wrote: > >> Hmm..just a thought: Have you considered "semantic networks"? Marko >> Rodriguez: >> "Marko A. Rodriguez" <[email protected]> >> .. has drawn several of us into considering "triple stores" as an adjunct >> to our work, both in redfish and the santa fe complex. >> >> The triple stores contain many triples of the nature of >> A verb B >> .. where A & B are nouns: Marko Knows Steve. Knows is a link between >> Marko and Steve. >> >> The triple store is a graph database such as: >> http://neo4j.org/ >> RDF is the "semantic web" use of triple stores: >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework >> .. and neo4j has an RDF layer, I believe. >> >> From your description, I could see models where agents were nodes with >> links between themselves. The dynamic nature you describe could be simply >> removing and adding links. >> >> I think the graph database idea is on the brink of exploding upon the >> computing scene. Its been around for quite a while, but folks are just >> starting to understand just how powerful a notion they are. Definitely NOT >> sql structured .. but might work very well in a Big Table like Google's App >> Engine. >> >> -- Owen >> > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org >
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
