Industrial Strength Networks

Image: Datasets published in the Linking Open Data community project, from Richard Cyganiak.

UPDATE: Emil Eifrem will offer a TechTalk at 1:00 at the complex on Neo, a high-performance graph database he has developed. The talk will dive into the Neo4j graph database from a software developer’s perspective while looking at some of the pros/cons of working with graph databases in enterprise software development. Admission is free. More information is available in the full article.

The information revolution can seem more like an algal bloom of data overwhelming us as we try to make sense of it all. We’re told it’s all part of a network, as though that makes the millions of web pages and trillions of data points understandable. The word has become part of popular culture, as we network in our jobs and social lives or join virtual communities like MySpace and LinkedIn to expand our physical networks exponentially. What is a network, really? And how do modern networks make sense of the bits of information flowing through them? This industrial strength blender will present an eclectic mix of speakers who will discuss their application of the network data model for various problems in academia and industry.

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speakers

Johan Bollen will present the use of the network in the modeling of the relationship between scholarly entities in the scholarly community. Joshua Shinavier will introduce the concepts of the Semantic Web paradigm and its industrial application. Emil Eifrem will discuss the role of his company in providing a high-performant graph database to store and query massive-scale networks. Finally, Marko A. Rodriguez will host the blender and provide the glue that unites the various speakers and their work.

JULY 15 UPDATE: Emil Eifrem will also offer a TechTalk to dive deep into the Neo4j graph database from a software developer’s perspective by walking through the graph representation API using simple examples, introducing Neo4j’s high-speed traverser framework, and demonstrating how to use the RDF layers that Neo Technology has developed in collaboration with Santa Fe’s Knowledge Reef Systems. He will also step back one level and look at some of the pros/cons of working with graph databases in enterprise software development, as well as look at the runtime characteristics of some typical use cases. His talk begins at 1:00 at the main hall of Santa Fe Complex, located at 632 Agua Fria St. parking is in the rear of the building; access is via Romero St. just east of the complex’s facilities.

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abstracts

Johan Bollen Abstract: I will discuss the methodology and preliminary results of the MESUR project at the LANL which has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to investigate the possibilities of usage-based metrics of scholarly impact. The MESUR project has led to the creation of a large-scale reference data set that combines usage data obtained from some of the most significant publishers, aggregators and institutional consortia with citation and bibliometric data. On the basis of the resulting reference data set, the MESUR project has conducted a two-pronged research effort. The first focuses on mapping and characterizing the structure of scientific activity, the second focuses on the calculation and comparison of a wide variety of social network metrics of journal impact.

Joshua Shinavier Abstract: The Semantic Web is a set of technologies and practices which bring structured, machine-accessible information to the Web. Whereas typical Web documents are meaningful only to people, the content of the Semantic Web has formal meaning, making it possible to interact with and reason upon that content in an automated fashion. Much as the Internet consists of a global network of interconnected machines, and the Web a global network of interconnected documents, so the Semantic Web represents a Giant Global Graph of interconnected concepts, or resources. This talk will introduce key components of the collective knowledge network that is the Semantic Web, such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF), the Web Ontology Language (OWL), and the notion of Linked Data.

Emil Eifrem Abstract: A graph database stores information structured as mathematical graphs — nodes, relationships and properties — instead of in tables. These three building blocks form a “node space,” which is an adaptive and flexible data structure that contains all data in your application. If your software handles information that is difficult to fit in static tables, such as data that is rapidly evolving, data that is formed as a graph or data that has a lot of optional attributes (so-called “semi-structured data”) then a graph database may offer you many advantages compared to traditional backends.

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speaker bios

Marko A. Rodriguez: Marko is currently a PostDoctoral researcher at the Center for Non-Linear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Chief Technology Officer for the Santa Fe-based Knowledge Reef Systems company. His research interests include network analysis algorithms, graph-based programming, and other random topics that he might find interesting for whatever reason.

Johan Bollen: Johan has a PhD in Experimental Psychology from U. Brussels, was once a professor of computer science at Old Dominion University and now works at the Los Alamos National Laboratory as a staff researcher. He is the principal investigator of the MESUR project which seeks to develop and study alternative metrics of scholarly impact from large-scale usage data. His interest include data mining, social networks, digital libraries and bibliometrics.

Joshua Shinavier: Joshua is a software developer and researcher in the areas of programming languages and human interaction with the Semantic Web. He received a BS in computer science and a BA in physics from Eastern Washington University and will begin PhD studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute this fall. Joshua is responsible for the core algorithms and software components of the Knowledge Reef Systems’ community platform.

Emil Eifrem: After some unsuccessful attempts at demo programming in the 80s, Emil Eifrem found a hacker’s home in the world of text role-playing games in the early days of the internet. 100,000 lines of spaghetti C, almost as many segfaults and several sleepless years later, he escaped into the warm embrace of Java 1.0a2 and has stayed there ever since. (He has no regrets but is secretly proud that the text game he founded is still played almost 15 years later.) After a decade as a developer, mentor and architect at a consulting- and product company in southern Sweden, Emil’s current focus is on evangelizing graph databases and preaching the demise of tabular solutions everywhere.