Why Nasa Converted Its Lessons-Learned Database into a Knowledge Graph

The tech story by NASA&#x27;s chief knowledge architect is more detailed on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linkurio.us&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-nasa-experiments-with-knowledge-discovery&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linkurio.us&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-nasa-experiments-with-knowledge...</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;neo4j.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;nasa-critical-data-knowledge-graph&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;neo4j.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;nasa-critical-data-knowledge-graph&#x2F;</a>, with a presentation video on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vwJyU9vsfmU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vwJyU9vsfmU</a><p>Disclamer: Linkurious CEO here, the tool used to explore the Neo4j graph database used at NASA.

I was hyped to read a cool article about NASA and tech, but this just reads like an advertising for a software that I&#x27;ve never heard of.

I spent a bulk of my programming career modelling business processes in a graph database with strong schema, lifecycle control (state machines) and formal change control (revisioning).<p>I was always blown away with how easy it was to turn around a very stable and useful system where the customers could actually understand the data model and refactoring was easy to reason through.<p>Graph databases FTW.

I didn&#x27;t know the LLIS was available online.<p>The first one I managed to click on was related to a fire in an employee&#x27;s car: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;llis.nasa.gov&#x2F;lesson&#x2F;943" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;llis.nasa.gov&#x2F;lesson&#x2F;943</a>

So one thing I still don&#x27;t understand is whether Neo4J a pure graph database is better than using something like AegensGraph[0] or Cayley[1], which uses a pre-existing DB engine for their persistent layer. If yes, what are the advantages? Is it something that totally depends on the use case? If it is, what criteria should be used to make a decision?<p>[0]:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;bitnine-oss&#x2F;agensgraph" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;bitnine-oss&#x2F;agensgraph</a> [1]:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cayleygraph&#x2F;cayley" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cayleygraph&#x2F;cayley</a>

The real NASA knowledge graph, with actual technical detail... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stardog.com&#x2F;categories&#x2F;nasa&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stardog.com&#x2F;categories&#x2F;nasa&#x2F;</a>

I wonder if there is an enterprise app that does this for you?<p>I can think of plenty of examples at my work where spidering a website and displaying it in a graph would be really cool.<p>Our wiki would be one for sure.

This seems to be an advertisement albeit a strange one. They make it clear that NASA used Neo4J rather than Nuclino. Neo4J is a true graph database, but I didn&#x27;t find anything on the Nuclino website that suggests what Nuclino really is or what technology it uses.

What I am looking for is a nice way (graph) where I can connect all kinds of events&#x2F;people&#x2F;commits&#x2F;bugs&#x2F;tickets and jump between them.<p>Currently I am putting links on GitHub PR descriptions so I know in my deployment GitHub repo, Who releases What, When and in Which cluster (where)<p>The PRs contain links to Jira tickets.<p>So all in all if you “sprinkle” enough links on GitHub Jira, I essentially can click through them and answer the question, how that ended up here? What changed? Where is the bug?<p>But I feel like this set of links referencing GitHub, Jira, PRs, Commits, Error Reports would be really fitting in some kind of graph

This kind of reminds me of the FMEA and its web structure, which is very useful.<p>It does share the big weakness with all the other such databases though, very hard to convince people to use it, specially to add and maintain content.

Does anybody here have a &#x27;canonical&#x27; application or example in mind that shows me what neo4j can do that matches my intuitive understanding better than the &#x27;regular&#x27; RDBMS?

One problem I&#x27;ve seen in start ups as they scale isn&#x27;t the lack of good documentation but the lack of information organization and hierarchy. The cost you pay is repeating experiments&#x2F;trials, and generally slower development. The best way, I&#x27;ve found to overcome this, is to just talk to people and construct an information map&#x2F;hierarchy as a mental model. Obviously, this process can&#x27;t scale with the business. I wonder if this tool would be useful for software&#x2F;product dev in start up environments?

Has anybody ever seen a knowledge database for a large organization that actually works? I always see these efforts but usually they turn out pretty useless because nobody keeps them up to date.

not very convincing. If the differentiator was the correlation of data in a more meaningful way - It doesn&#x27;t matter if you display the correlating data in a list or a graph...

Is there any way to view the knowledge graph in the new design? Lot&#x27;s of other people linking the database itself, but I can&#x27;t actually find a link with the new design...

This reads like SCP but with NASA and sometimes more scary.

Never heard of this in my four years there. Hrm.

It&#x27;s not like space-travel knowledge-bases are rocket science ... oh, wait.

Really rather not read a bunch of content marketing on this site. Could we stick to news?