Product: HyperGraphDB - A Graph Database
Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 11:30AM
HighScalability Team in Product, graph

With the success of Neo4j as a graph database in the NoSQL revolution, it's interesting to see another graph database, HyperGraphDB, in the mix. Their quick blurb on HyperGraphDB says it is a: general purpose, extensible, portable, distributed, embeddable, open-source data storage mechanism. It is a graph database designed specifically for artificial intelligence and semantic web projects, it can also be used as an embedded object-oriented database for projects of all sizes.

From the NoSQL Archive the summary on HyperGraphDB is: API: Java (and Java Langs), Written in:Java,  Query Method: Java or P2P, Replication: P2P, Concurrency: STM, Misc: Open-Source, Especially for AI and Semantic Web.

So it has some interesting features, like software transactional memory and P2P  for data distribution, but I found that my first and most obvious question was not answered: what the heck is a hypergraph and why do I care? Buried in the tutorial was:

A HyperGraphDB database is a generalized graph of entities. The generalization is two-fold:

  1. Links/edges "point to" an arbitrary number of elements instead of just two as in regular graphs 
  2. Links can be pointed to by other links as well.

OK, but I wish there was some explanation of why this is valuable. What can I do with it that I can't do with normal graphs? Given that there have been concerns over the complexity of the API this would seem a natural topic to cover. I assume it's cool, it sounds cool, but I would like to know why :-)

In any case it looks like an interesting product to take a look at. Database options are still expanding fast.

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