Modern Graph Databases: Practice and Research

• Dr Hugo Firth, Prof. Jim Webber Neo4j
• Email: hugo.firth@neo4j.com

Driven by a rise in the complexity and associativity of modern data, graph databases have become increasingly commonplace in information systems. With the AI wave upon us, graph databases are increasingly critical for creating dependable systems (via architectural patterns like GraphRAG). This tutorial will place graph databases in context for systems and research professionals helping to differentiate them from relational, NoSQL, and Semantic Web tools. It will help attendees to understand how to build a graph data model and query it with the Cypher query language (a precursor and close relative of the new ISO GQL standard). It will also provide architectural guidance on how to integrate graph data with
modern AI systems. For researchers, the tutorial will highlight some of the novel challenges that arise when building graph databases (compared to other database types) and discuss how the Neo4j engineering and research teams have sought to address those challenges in the past and in the near future.