The Practitioner's Guide to Graph Data: Applying Graph Thinking and Graph Technologies to Solve Complex Problems

Graph data closes the gap between the way humans and computers view the world. While computers rely on static rows and columns of data, people navigate and reason about life through relationships. This practical guide demonstrates how graph data brings these two approaches together. By working with concepts from graph theory, database schema, distributed systems, and data analysis, you’ll arrive at a unique intersection known as graph thinking.

Authors Denise Koessler Gosnell and Matthias Broecheler show data engineers, data scientists, and data analysts how to solve complex problems with graph databases. You’ll explore templates for building with graph technology, along with examples that demonstrate how teams think about graph data within an application.

• Build an example application architecture with relational and graph technologies
• Use graph technology to build a Customer 360 application, the most popular graph data pattern today
• Dive into hierarchical data and troubleshoot a new paradigm that comes from working with graph data
• Find paths in graph data and learn why your trust in different paths motivates and informs your preferences
• Use collaborative filtering to design a Netflix-inspired recommendation system

Dr. Denise Gosnell’s passion for examining, applying, and evangelizing the applications of graph data was ignited during her apprenticeship under Dr. Teresa Haynes and Dr. Debra Knisley during her first NSF Fellowship. This group’s work was one of the earliest applications of neural networks and graph theoretic structure in predictive computational biology. Since then, Dr. Gosnell has built, published, patented, and spoke on dozens of topics related to graph theory, graph algorithms, graph databases, and applications of graph data across all industry verticals.

Currently, Dr. Gosnell is with DataStax where she aspires to build upon her experiences as a data scientist and graph architect. Prior to her role with DataStax, she built software solutions for and spoke at over a dozen conferences on permissioned blockchains, machine learning applications of graph analytics, and data science within the healthcare industry.

Dr. Matthias Broecheler is a technologist and entrepreneur with substantial research anddevelopment experience who is focused on disruptive software technologies and understanding complex systems. Dr. Broecheler’s is known as an industry expert in graph databases, relational machine learning, and big data analysis in general. He is a practitioner of lean methodologies and experimentation to drive continuous improvement. Dr. Broecheler is the inventor of the Titan graph database and a founder of Aurelius.