threatgrid / asami
Asami is a graph database, which may be a new approach to data management for some users. This page tries to explain what graph data is and how to use Asami to interact with it.
When we refer to a "Graph Database" we are not referring to the sort of graph that we often see in magazines, or are generated from spreadsheets. Instead, the "graph" being referenced here is a branch of mathematics called "Graph Theory". These graphs describe a set of items called "Nodes", which are connected with lines that are called "Edges".
An example of this might be a graph of social connections between people. The people in such a network can be represented by the "nodes" of a graph, and the "edges" can represent the social connections between them.
Each node appears once in a graph, regardless of how many connections it may have, and any pair of nodes will only have a single edge between them. Another important thing is that an image of a graph is merely a representation of the data. The location of the nodes and the edges do not matter. Also, edges do not interact in any way, so even if the lines indicating edges cross over each other, this does not mean anything. For instance, the following 2 graphs represent identical data to the above graph:
While many subtleties emerge from this structure, these simple ideas describe the entire foundation of this branch of mathematics!
