Knowledge Graph Technology Showcase E2: Honest Review of Grakn
Channel: Ashleigh Faith
Date: 17/12/2020

*Not Sponsored* Grakn is a new modeling and inferencing tool and database. Very different to traditional graph tooling, check out my honest review of Grakn and if you like what you see, or are even just curious, go check it out, its free :-)

First Impressions: New Kid on the Block. Passionate group of people working collaboratively on a new open source model that adds additional semantics to graph-like structures and may even serve as a supplementary “hypergraph” to property graph or triple stores. Grakn uses a model focusing on multi-relationship classes where each class can have multiple relations as well as sub-types for some interesting inheritance and inference views, similar to categorical mathematical modeling used in physics for multidimensional membership classes. This allows Grakn to up-the-ante on faster and more intuitive inferencing, albeit at the expense of performance (currently being improved).
May have a steep learning curve, not because it is necessarily more complex than traditional graph, but because it is a very different way of working with graphs and there are no real standards or significant adoption to learn from -but they do say they are trying to make the modeling more intuitive so once you get the hang of it, this may be easier than what we are all used to. Time and more exposure will tell and at the end of the day it is open source so you can learn at your own pace if you want to dive in.

Timestamps: 
-Skip the review criteria segment (it is the same for all episodes): 03:00
-Skip to my detailed summary for Grakn: 20:49

Note: detailed specs are not part of these initial reviews but if you are interested, leave a comment below and we can do a part 2!

Stay in touch:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleighnfaith/
Direct Message: isadatathing-at-gmail.com

Resources:
-Website: https://grakn.ai/
-YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/GraknLabs
-Thesis describing hypergraph: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.02574
-Good summary article on hypergraph: https://medium.com/@npsinghmrj/what-are-graph-databases-and-different-types-of-graph-databases-369e5040a9d0
-Hypergraph in physics: https://medium.com/syncedreview/stephen-wolfram-the-path-to-a-fundamental-theory-of-physics-may-begin-with-a-hypergraph-c1fd124b6e62