Thomas Frisendal

Position statement for the W3C Workshop on Web Standardization for Graph Data, Monday 4th March to Wednesday 6th March 2019, Berlin, Germany:

"Languages for representing graph data are graphs themselves (metadata graphs). Graph technology and algorithms can greatly support analysis and visualisation of the meta-level of the languages. This should be explored in the standardisation work."

Who am I?

I am an experienced database professional with more than 40 years on the IT vendor side and as an independent consultant. I have worked with databases and data modeling since the late 70s. Since 1995 primarily on data warehouse projects, but today I work mostly with graph database technology. I have a strong urge to visualize everything as graphs - also datamodels. My experiences with graph includes a (presales) project for Profium (Janne Saarela et al) on their RDF-based SIR product around 2001 as well as the last 3 years working with property graphs (in particular Neo4j). In 2016 I published the book "Graph Data Modeling for NoSQL and SQL" on Technics Publications (https://technicspub.com/graph-data-modeling/).

I am not only an active writer but I am also a speaker. In 2019 I will speak at Enterprise Data World in Boston in March (speach: "Open House in the Metadata Science Lab", https://edw2019.dataversity.net/sessionPop.cfm?confid=126&proposalid=10297).

The proposition

In the informal Existing Languages Working Group in the GQL standards community I have built a graph database (in Neo4j) containing the features and language of graph languages across GCORE, GSQL, PGQL, OpenCypher and SQL-PG. An early version of this work was reported at the GQL Standards 2nd committee update in November of 2018. The slides can be found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1U6ETL1pF1SJvVl9T5GEsJkiowwy5HWPV/view . I aim to continue this work in phase 2 of the GQL ELWG subproject, and I am willing to extend it to also the W3C graph languages. I hope that a short presentation will create this interest and that we can establish a small team of co-workers maintaining and developing such a meta-repository of graph languages.

Example graph from ELWG interim reporting in November, 2018: Partial view of syntax tags across languages

Thomas Frisendal Copenhagen 2019-01-11 LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-frisendal-19a56a Email: thomasf@tf-informatik.dk Twitter: @VizDataModeler