HyperGraphDB 1.1 Released

Kobrix Software is pleased to announce the first official release of HyperGraphDB version 1.1.

HyperGraphDB is a general purpose, free open-source data storage mechanism. Geared toward modern applications with complex and evolving domain models, it is suitable for semantic web, artificial intelligence, social networking or regular object-oriented business applications.

HyperGraphDB is a Java based product built on top of the Berkeley DB storage library.

Key Features of HyperGraphDB include:

• Powerful data modeling and knowledge representation.
• Graph-oriented storage.
• N-ary, higher order relationships (edges) between graph nodes.
• Graph traversals and relational-style queries.
• Customizable indexing.
• Customizable storage management.
• Extensible, dynamic DB schema through custom typing.
• Out of the box Java OO database.
• Fully transactional and multi-threaded, MVCC/STM.
• P2P framework for data distribution.

In addition, the project includes several practical domain specific components for semantic web, reasoning and natural language processing. For more information, documentation and downloads, please visit the HyperGraphDB Home Page.

HyperGraphDB at Strange Loop 2010

I will be giving a brief talk on HyperGraphDB on the Strange Loop conference in St-Louis on October 14. The talk will focus on the HyperGraphDB data model, architecture and why it's well suitable for complex software systems, as opposed to other models, SQL, NOSQL, or conventional graph databases.

This conference is highly recommended! Judging by the program and the list of speakers, it is truly as the organizers promote it: from developers for developers. It is about cutting edge technology, it is about everything hot going on this days in the world of software development, it is technical and it looks fun. So, please come buy!

Website: http://strangeloop2010.com/

You are encouraged to register with the website, and interact with the speakers online before the conference.

Cheers,
Boris

HyperGraphDB at IWGD 2010

The architecture of HyperGraphDB will be presented at The First International Workshop on Graph Database during WAIM 2010 (the Web Age Information Management conference) taking place on July 15-17 in Jiuzhai Valley, China. For more information, please see:

http://www.icst.pku.edu.cn/IWGD2010/index.html

The presentation will be done by Borislav Iordanov and it will focus on the unique HyperGraphDB data model, type system and discuss some of the architectural choices and their impact on performance. The accompanying paper can be found here:

http://kobrix.com/documents/hypergraphdb.pdf

HyperGraphDB 1.1 Alpha Released

Kobrix Software is pleased to announce the release HyperGraphDB 1.1 Alpha. HyperGraphDB is a general purpose, extensible, portable, distributed, embeddable, open-source data storage mechanism. Designed specifically for artificial intelligence and semantic web projects, it can also be used as an embedded object-oriented database for projects of all sizes.

This is an initial, alpha release of the next version of HyperGraphDB. A complete list of changes is availabe at:

http://code.google.com/p/hypergraphdb/wiki/NextReleaseNotes

To download, please vist the HyperGraphDB project home page at Google.

For more information about HyperGraphDB's features, documentation and additional pointers, please visist the HyperGraphDB home page at Kobrix.

Poetry About Our Art

About 14 years ago, at the pick of the object-oriented programming craze I came across a publication called On the Origin of Objects, randomly placed amidst the stream of software/OO engineering books at a very reliable computer science bookstore. Surely, I thought, this would get to the bottom of things, somebody has dissected the notion of objects and outlined all the fundamentals I would need to be a successful programmer without the need to skim through endless pages describing ridiculous design processes, trivial principles, inapplicable rules of thumb and what not. It turned out the book had nothing to do with object-oriented programming.

On the Origin of Objects (amazon link) is about metaphysics with computation as the starting point. The author is one of the deepest and most original thinkers I've come across - Brian Cantwell Smith (wikipedia link). Needless to say, I couldn't read it at the time, I wasn't ready for it. That came about 7 years later and it was a memorable, mentally reinvigorating experience. Smith writes beautifully and dances around his insights with such grace and depth. He writes about the kind of computation we do day to day, the real stuff, and he puts common conceptual problems we programmers face into the center stage of philosophy in a way that gives our work those extra dimensions that scientists seem to have always enjoyed - a fundamental, very real connection to the physical world, including, at an even deeper level, a connection with us intentional beings, a set of problems that arise naturally from the practice of our profession, yet quickly reach the most difficult metaphysics in a way that no other practice does.

There are a few (not many) articles you could find on the internet from Prof. Smith, all of them worth reading. However, the purpose of this blurb is to bring to the attention to whoever comes across it his latest work. For the past years, I've been eagerly monitoring and waiting the publication of Age of Significance, which is supposed to be in 7 volumes. The book website, http://ageofsignificance.org/, hadn't changed until just two months ago where it was announced that individual chapters will be published monthly. So far, only the introduction has been posted at http://ageofsignificance.org/aos/en/toc.html and I believe that an attentive read would make my seeming infatuation with this work understandable. Originally, I intended to write a summary of that introduction, highlighting the main points, most of which I'm already familiar with from previous writings (Smith's and others), but I wouldn't want to butcher it. It is philosophy at its best. And it is about the foundation of computing, that which we (should, to say the least) care about. I will just quote the conclusion for the hardcore philosophy skeptics:

Throughout the whole project, I have received countless communications from programmers and computer scientists - over coffee, in the midst of debugging sessions, in conferences, at bars and via email - hoping that it might be possible to say what they feel they know, the absence of which, in some cases, has led to almost existential frustration.

That is pretty much how I've felt more often than not as a programmer. And that is why, to me Smith's work is pure poetry, as philosophy used to be seen at the time of Plato anyway.

Cheers,

Boris

Seco 0.3 Released

Kobrix Software is pleased to announce the release of Seco 0.3 Seco, formerly known as Scriba, is a scripting development environment for JVM-based dynamic languages. Seco has been in active development and use for the past several years and it is a perfect companion to the serious Java developer.

Key features include:

- Support of many popular JVM languages with syntax highlighting and code completion for most.
- Advanced script editing interface based on structured notebooks as popularized by the Mathematica system.
- A WYSIWYG HTML editor for documentation.
- An infinite, zoomable 2D canvas for arbitrary layout of components, container nesting and more.
- Full workspace automatically persisted in an embedded HyperGraphDB database.
- Support for importing 3d party libraries in multiple evaluation contexts.
- Based on the JSR 223 standard for language interoperability - all languages share the same runtime context.
- Real-time collaboration and exchange of components and notebooks via a P2P network.

Seco is perfect not only for prototyping, testing and experimentation, but it is also the ideal tool for learning a given JVM language or a new Java library. It can be used to build complete interactive applications embedded within the environment itself similarly to a life system like Squeak!

Seco is free, open-source, LGPL licensed software.

To download and for more information, please visit the Seco home page at Kobrix.

HyperGraphDB @ NoSQL Live

NoSQL has picked up a lot of steam lately. HyperGraphDB being a NoSQL DB par excellence, we will be joining the upcomping conference organized by the 10gen, the maker of MongoDB:

"NoSQL Live from Boston is a full-day interactive conference that brings together the thinking in this space. Picking up where other NoSQL events have left off, NoSQL Live goes beyond understanding the basics of these databases to how they are used in production systems. It features panel discussions on use cases, lightning talks, networking session, and a NoSQL Lab where attendees can get a practical view of programming with NoSQL databases."

The conference takes place on March 11, 2010. For more information and to register (fees are really small!), goto http://www.10gen.com/events.

Borislav Iordanov will be on the graph databases panel as well as on the live hacking session later in the afternoon. The talk will focus on real world graph database applications and reveal some of the interesting architectural bits behind HyperGraphDB. More extensive chats and demos during the live session.

For more information on HyperGraphDB, visit http://www.kobrix.com/hgdb.jsp