I have a quixotic project I've been tilting at off and on for 5 years now, where all the existing solutions make poor use of relational databases (usually SQLite), but the problem maps directly onto an EAV graph database. I was worried I'd have to write my own query metalanguage, but now I don't have to!
It's depressing how much the W3C salted the earth with the way they tied RDF to the twin loadstones of terrible XML tree serialization and SemWeb wankery. I couldn't find any way to get anything useful done with their SPARQL either.
EAV graph databases might have their day in the sun thanks to the NoSQL hype-wave. AppEngine's BigTable-backed datastore is a terrific exemplar, hopefully other players can come up with similarly compelling APIs and hosting stories.
The advantage to this is that it works as an ad-hoc query language for existing graph databases. I could use Gremlin to generate views of the data, and have other programs operating on database independently.
Prolog doesn't really play well with others -- it's effectively its own operating system like Smalltalk or Pick.
A while back I looked to see if anyone had used XPath for graph traversal, since it seemed like a good fit. I'm working on a similar concept (but not that similar).
I didn't find this at the time, but now that I have, it looks like a great package. Thanks, submitter! This is probably what I'll be doing with my Friday night.
Gremlin is not that old, and still in 0.1 ALPHA. Hope you enjoy it, feel free to join the users list at http://groups.google.com/group/gremlin-users . Would love to get feedback on it!
I have a quixotic project I've been tilting at off and on for 5 years now, where all the existing solutions make poor use of relational databases (usually SQLite), but the problem maps directly onto an EAV graph database. I was worried I'd have to write my own query metalanguage, but now I don't have to!
It's depressing how much the W3C salted the earth with the way they tied RDF to the twin loadstones of terrible XML tree serialization and SemWeb wankery. I couldn't find any way to get anything useful done with their SPARQL either.
EAV graph databases might have their day in the sun thanks to the NoSQL hype-wave. AppEngine's BigTable-backed datastore is a terrific exemplar, hopefully other players can come up with similarly compelling APIs and hosting stories.