Stardog

Figure 1 – Stardog user experiences

Stardog features three distinct user experiences, as shown in Figure 1: Stardog Explorer, a query layer designed for visually exploring your knowledge graphs; Stardog Designer, a no-code, visual environment for building and maintaining your knowledge graphs; and Stardog Studio, a code-based IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for writing more complex queries and administering your knowledge graphs. Designer is particularly notable for the degree of automation it provides for building out the semantic models (ontologies) and mappings that underpin your knowledge graphs. Various domain and/or industry-specific templates (called Knowledge Kits) are also provided to facilitate model-building. Likewise, Studio offers features like contextually aware auto-completion that facilitate increased developer productivity, though their effect is somewhat more subtle owing to its code-driven nature.

Figure 2 – Stardog architecture

Stardog’s architecture is illustrated in Figure 2. It has several notable features, including BITES NLP (Natural Language Processing), an extensible document storage system that provides configurable storage and processing for unifying unstructured data with Stardog graphs, and virtual graphs, which allow you to declaratively map structured data into Stardog and query it from there, unifying structured data into the platform as well. In addition, the platform provides out-of-the-box (virtual) connectors for a range of popular data sources, and an SDK is available for users to develop their own connections.

There are some recently added features worth highlighting. These include geo-replication for high availability clusters; industry Knowledge Kits, which offer predefined ontologies, data models, and other assets tailored to specific verticals or use cases; enterprise metadata knowledge graphs, knowledge graphs that span multiple data catalogues and data sources via pre-built integrations with Collibra, Unity, Microsoft Purview and more; and an entity resolution service (in beta as of writing), which enables you to identify and link data representing the same entities across different data silos via unsupervised machine learning algorithms. Notably, Stardog is also developing Voicebox, a natural language interaction interface designed to produce either SPARQL code or a visual, semantic model corresponding to your natural language queries.

Enterprise knowledge graphs are currently proving very popular, and for good reason. When you have a large amount of data, and when that data is complex, highly interrelated, and spread out over multiple sources, it can be very difficult to grasp its structure and meaning. In other words, to understand it. Knowledge graphs are an excellent way of addressing this issue, and thus leveraging your data as effectively as possible.

Stardog offers some significant advantages when it comes to knowledge graphs. Its extensive reasoning and inferencing, its support for unifying both structured and unstructured data through a combination of virtualisation and materialisation techniques, its strides towards ease of use and a newcomer-friendly user experience, its capacity for integration, its automated model building, and its (upcoming) entity resolution service are all worth noting. In addition, Stardog is built to operate at enterprise scale, and offers high performance on distributed, real-world data. What is more, the fact that it supports Gremlin as well as SPARQL is helpful, as is the fact that it can operate as a labelled property graph, because while information architects tend to like RDF graphs built on open standards, developers often prefer property graphs, and supporting both gives it the best of both worlds.

The Bottom Line

Stardog is a full-fledged knowledge graph platform supported by an equally full-fledged graph database. This means that it is particularly suited to helping you understand large, complex, highly heterogeneous data environments and capitalise fully on the data therein. In short, if you want to build a knowledge graph, Stardog is an excellent means of doing so.