Databases

Model of data as relations, that is tables of rows with named columns, queried by declarative operations on whole sets; proposed by E.F. Codd and the basis of SQL databases.

Way of modelling a domain as entities, their attributes and the relationships between them, drawn as ER diagrams; introduced by Peter Chen in 1976 as a unified view of the network, relational and entity-set models.

Data too large, fast-moving or varied for ordinary databases, and the methods for drawing value from it by analysis at scale; the term spread around 2010 as companies mined logs, clicks and sensor data.

Graph model in which nodes and relationships carry labels and key–value properties; the model behind Neo4j and GQL, and the main rival to RDF for graph data.

Database built to store RDF triples and answer SPARQL queries; Virtuoso is one example.

E.F. Codd's 1970 paper in Communications of the ACM proposing that data be organized as relations (tables), independently of how it is stored.

Peter Chen's paper in the first issue of ACM Transactions on Database Systems, proposing to model data as entities and the relationships between them.

Raymond Reiter's 1978 paper formalizing the closed-world assumption: a database may treat any fact it cannot show to be true as false.

2004 OSDI paper by Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat describing how Google split computations over huge datasets across thousands of ordinary machines; it set the pattern for big data processing.

WWW 2007 paper presenting YAGO, a knowledge base that attaches facts extracted from Wikipedia to WordNet's taxonomy, with high measured accuracy.

2009 workshop paper by Oktie Hassanzadeh and Mariano Consens presenting LinkedMDB, linked open data about films and their links to other datasets.

Paper by Pérez, Arenas and Gutiérrez giving SPARQL a compositional formal semantics and proving the complexity of evaluating it; general SPARQL patterns are PSPACE-complete.

ISWC 2009 paper by Hartig, Bizer and Freytag proposing link-traversal querying: a SPARQL query is answered by following links and looking up URIs as it runs, so the data sources need not be known in advance.

Olaf Hartig's 2017 paper proposing to nest RDF triples, so a statement can carry metadata such as a source or a certainty score without standard reification's bloat. It led to RDF-star and to triple terms in RDF 1.2.

Report of a W3C workshop held in Berlin in March 2019 that brought the RDF, property-graph and SQL communities together. It backed a property-graph query language developed alongside SQL (GQL) and discussed extending RDF to make statements about statements.

Survey by Aidan Hogan and 17 co-authors of the data models, query languages, reasoning and methods behind knowledge graphs.

ISO's family of standards for describing manufactured products so CAD, manufacturing and archive systems can exchange them, begun in 1984 and first published in 1994–95; its EXPRESS schema language is an early example of a formal shared data model across an industry.

ISO standard query language for property graphs, published in April 2024 and partly derived from Neo4j's Cypher; the property-graph counterpart to SPARQL.

Early geographic information system built for the Government of Canada from the early 1960s to store and analyse the Canada Land Inventory; it ran until the late 1980s.

OpenLink Software's database server for SQL and RDF data, used to publish DBpedia and many other Linked Data sets.

Open-source framework, started in 2006 by Doug Cutting and Mike Cafarella, that implemented MapReduce and a distributed file system and made big data processing available outside Google.

Property-graph database queried with the Cypher language; begun as an open-source project in Sweden in 2007, with version 1.0 in 2010.

Knowledge base built at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics that combines facts from Wikipedia with WordNet's taxonomy (later with schema.org's); with DBpedia, one of the first large knowledge bases extracted from Wikipedia.

Linked open data about films, built at the University of Toronto and presented in April 2009, with links from its films to DBpedia and other datasets.

International Organization for Standardization, which publishes GQL and Topic Maps.

Database and Linked Data software company founded by Kingsley Idehen; it develops Virtuoso.

British computer scientist at IBM who invented the relational model of data in 1969–1970, the basis of relational databases; he received the 1981 Turing Award.

Canadian computer scientist and logician who formalized the closed-world assumption for databases in 1978.

Taiwanese-American computer scientist who introduced the entity–relationship model in 1976, later at Carnegie Mellon and Louisiana State University.

German database researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, co-author of the YAGO paper (2007).

Founder and CEO of OpenLink Software and a chief architect of its Virtuoso server, which publishes DBpedia.

Semantic Web researcher at the University of Chile and lead author of the 2021 survey 'Knowledge Graphs'.

Israeli-American computer scientist working on data integration; co-author of 'The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data' (2009).

Chilean computer scientist at the Universidad de Chile and co-author of the formal semantics of SPARQL (2009).

American software designer who co-created Apache Hadoop, as well as the search libraries Lucene and Nutch.

Computer scientist, now a professor at Télécom Paris, who created YAGO.

Computer scientist, co-author of the YAGO paper (2007).

American computer scientist at Google who co-designed MapReduce and co-wrote word2vec.

German computer scientist and database researcher who co-authored the 2009 paper on querying the Web of Linked Data by following links.

Chilean computer scientist at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and co-author of the formal semantics of SPARQL (2009).

Chilean computer scientist at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and co-author of the formal semantics of SPARQL (2009).

University of Toronto computer scientist and co-author of the Linked Movie Database.

Associate professor at the University of Cambridge working on local-first software and distributed systems; lead author of the 2024 Bluesky paper.

American computer scientist who co-created Apache Hadoop.

Computer scientist who built the Linked Movie Database at the University of Toronto, presented in 2009.

American software engineer at Google, co-author of MapReduce.

Chinese-American computer scientist who led Google's Knowledge Vault and later Amazon's product knowledge graph.