Graph Database For Collaborative Communities

Data manipulated in an enterprise context are structured data as well as unstructured data such as emails, documents, and social networks. Graphs are a natural way of representing and modeling such data (structured, semistructured, and unstructured ones) in a unified manner. The main advantage of such a structure relies on the dynamic aspect and the capability to represent relations, even multiple ones, between objects. Recent database research work shows a growing interest in the definition of graph models and languages to allow a natural way of presenting data. In this chapter, we provide a survey of the main graph database models and the associated graph query languages. We then present an application using a graph database to extract social networks.