sones GraphDB Crunchbase Use-Case Tutorial
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If you want to explain how easy it is for a user or developer to use the
sones GraphDB to work on exist­ing datasets you do that by showing him
an example – a use case. And this is exactly what this short series of 
articles will do: It’ll show the important steps and concepts, 
technologies and designs behind the use case and the sones GraphDB.

The sones GraphDB is a DBMS focusing on strong connected unstructured
and semistructured data. As the name implies these data sets are 
organized in Nodes and Edges objectoriented in a graph data structure.

This series already tells in it’s name what the use case is: 
The “CrunchBase”.  On their website they speak for themselves to 
explain what it is: “CrunchBase is the free database of technology 
companies, people, and investors that anyone can edit.”. There are many
reasons why this was chosen as a use-case. One important reason is that
all data behind the CrunchBase service is licensed under
Creative-Commons-Attribution (CC-BY) license. So it’s freely available
data of high-tech companies, people and investors.

Currently there are more than 40.000 different companies, 51.000 different
people and 4.200 different investors in the database. The flood of
information is big and the scale of connectivity even bigger. The graph
represented by the nodes could be even bigger than that but because of the
limiting factors of current relational database technology it’s not feasible
to try to do that.

sones GraphDB is coming to the rescue: because it’s optimized to handle huge
datasets of strongly connected data. Since the CrunchBase data could be uses
as a starting point to drive connectivity to even greater detail it’s a great
use-case to show these migration and handling.

Thankfully the developers at CrunchBase already made one or two steps into an
object oriented world by offering an API which answers queries in JSON format.
By using this API everyone can access the complete data set in a very
structured way. That’s both good and bad. Because the used technologies don’t
offer a way to represent linked objects they had to use what we call
“relational helpers”. For example: A person founded a company. (person and
company being a JSON object). There’s no standardized way to model a
relationship between those two. So what the CrunchBase developers did is they
added an unique-Identifier to each object. And they added a new object which
is uses as a “relational helper”-object. The only purpose of these helper
objects is to point towards a unique-identifier of another object type. So in
our example the relationship attribute of the person object is not pointing
directly to a specific company or relationship, but it’s pointing to the helper
object which stores the information which unique-identifier of which object
type is meant by that link.