Neo4j’s schema-free property graph model is powerful, but it leaves important semantic questions open: What does a label, property, or relationship type mean? Which properties should labels or types have, and which label combinations should relationship types connect? This talk introduces a lightweight metamodel and ontology framework that defines these meanings directly inside the Neo4j database, keeping semantics available, synchronized, and compatible with evolving or non-conforming graphs. [1]
The approach follows a practical “maybe, should, could” mindset rather than a rigid logic system, inspired by duck typing and open-world thinking. It also shows how our opensource GraphEditor supports the metamodel through semantic browsing, editing, visualization, parameterized queries, full-text search, persistent graph perspectives, and styling. Finally, the talk compares this approach with RDF 1.2.
[1]: https://github.com/dbsystel/grapheditor/blob/main/docs/metamodel.md
Speaker
Georg Schwarz
Experte (Graph Data Scientist), DB Systel
Georg Schwarz, graph data scientist at DB Systel, has been working on projects spanning from freight train path planning, automated shunting, operational infrastructure management and graph algorithms. He has studied mathematics with a focus on graph theory, optimization and operations research. In the InfraGraphAnalytics team he develops methods for data quality analysis.
