Hi Daniel, If you haven't yet, you should check out the work done in the Neo4j Spatial project - https://github.com/neo4j/spatial - which has fairly comprehensive support for GIS.
Data locality, as you mention, is exactly a big advantage of using a graph for geospatial data. Take a look at the Neo4j Spatial project and let us know what you think. Best, Andreas On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 9:58 AM, danielb <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello everyone, > > I am going to write my master thesis about the suitability of graph > databases in GIS applications (at least I hope so^^). The database has to > provide topological queries, network analysis and the ability to store > large > amount of mapdata for viewing - all based on OSM-data of Germany (< 100M > nodes). Most likely I will compare Neo4j to PostGIS. > As a starting point I want to know why you would recommend Neo4j to do the > job? What are the main advantages of a graph database compared to a > (object-)relational database in the GIS environment? The main focus and the > goal of this work should be to show a performance improvement over > relational databases. > In a student project (OSM navigation system) we worked with relational > (SQLite) and object-oriented (Perst) databases on netbook hardware and > embedded systems. The relational database approach showed us two problems: > If you transfer the OSM model directly into tables then you have a lot of > joins which slows everything down (and lots of redundancy when using > different tables for each zoom level). The other way is to store as much as > possible in one big (sparse) table. But this would also have some > performance issues I guess and from a design perspective it is not a nice > solution. The object-oriented database also suffered from many random reads > when loading a bounding box. In addition we could not say how data was > stored in detail. > The performance indeed increased after caching occured or by the use of SSD > hardware. You can also store everything in RAM (money does the job), but > for > now you have to assume that all of the data has to be read from a slow disk > the first time. Can Neo4j be configured to read for example a bounding box > of OSM data from disk in an efficient way (data locality)? > Maybe you also have some suggestions where I should have a look at in this > work and what can be improved in Neo4j to get better results. I also would > appreciate related papers. > > kindly regards, Daniel > > -- > View this message in context: > http://neo4j-community-discussions.438527.n3.nabble.com/Neo4j-in-GIS-Applications-tp3393925p3393925.html > Sent from the Neo4j Community Discussions mailing list archive at > Nabble.com. > _______________________________________________ > Neo4j mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.neo4j.org/mailman/listinfo/user > _______________________________________________ Neo4j mailing list [email protected] https://lists.neo4j.org/mailman/listinfo/user
