GraphConnect London 2015

Today I had the opportunity to participate on the GraphConnect London 2015. So I would like to take the time to write a little bit about it.

I will not spend a lot of time on the technicalities of the convention, which I believe can be better investigate once the presentations are published (check you at Neo4J website). So I would like to give a general impression of the directions that I saw being traced by the speakers and a impression of where the graphs are being used currently.

Just to give a boundary of on what my impressions are based on, here is the list of of presentations that I have participated (excluded the Welcome, Opening Keynote and Closing Keynote, as everyone participated on those):

• Monitoring Using, Big Data Tooling (Hans Verhoef)
• Graphing Your Way to Knowledge in the Enterprise (Graham York, Phil Harvey)
• Graph Theory in Practice (David Simons)
• Spreadsheets are Graphs! (Prof. Felienne Hermanns)
• Mastering Customer Information – Using Graph as a Foundation for the Agile Enterprise (Aaron Wallace)
• The Game-Changing Graph Application Platform (Axel Morgner)
• Superpowers for Recruitment (Matt Wright)
• Delivering the Most Relevant and Compeling Digital Content to adidas Consumers (Sokratis Kartelias)

Let’s start with the good points: Graph Databases is a reality, people are using in production and not only the crazy big companies with really special requirements, applications for the more “main stream” are starting to use it, proving that the concepts and technology had hit the market and are getting there.

From the bad side: none of the presented cases are really using the technology in new grounds, having a different view on the situations where such powerful tool could be used, what was presented as use cases always hover over the same topics, analytic, searches and people relations (usually as an extra on the searches) . Although all those are really valid applications I would be expecting to have in something like the GraphConnect to be presenting more cutting edge ideas.

Having that said there was some really good presentations which even if it didn’t pushed the ideas of what we usually see the Graph being used to another level, it did introduced (at least for me) few new concepts that are worth looking at: knowledge management, textual based information and business agility.

Another bit of disappointment  was on the Community Track, I was expecting a more on hands examples and there wasn’t much of it, and they didn’t really went deep on the usage of the graph, more like we used graph to solve this domain that is it. I will stop here because I don’t want to sound like it was bad, that is not it, had some really good presentations, but the short time of the speakers and a little bit of “of graph” topic end up consuming possible topics on graphs.

Now jumping to the organization I will keep it simple: well done, organized and no big issues (excepted that took me 1/2 hour to find the building, but that is my and GPS’ fault).

My recommendation for the community would be to look at more ground breaking ideas of using Graphs, the usual graph domain on the internet of things and social networks we all know already, but I am sure that is more things out there.

My last words are for the Neo4J keynotes, mainly the closing keynote that outlined the Neo4J evolution; if I would have to summarize the it: more and more reliability  that is going to be their focus, they will not compromise on that for having more availability – their concept is that probably availability can have a graceful degradation without compromising reliability. Also they will invest more on the embedded interface like with the neo4J-sync, and finally improving the client server connection with a native clients (I believe we will see less focus on the REST interface from now on).

That is basically it! As I said I hope that I didn’t make it sound too bad, I do recommend for you to check out the presentation on Neo4J site (not available yet, I will post the link once they get online); and hope that on next events we would see more cutting edge ideas, as talking about Graph is not edge anymore (as it was like 3-5 years ago).