The email sent will contain a link to this article, the article title, and an article excerpt (if available). For security reasons, your IP address will also be included in the sent email.
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:
- Links/edges "point to" an arbitrary number of elements instead of just two as in regular graphs
- 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 expanding fast.
Return to Article
