InfoGrid

InfoGrid is a Web Graph Database with a many additional software components that make the development of REST-ful web applications on a graph foundation easy. InfoGrid is open source, and is being developed in Java as a set of projects. As powerful as InfoGrid is, it derives much of its power from just a handful of core ideas. Users can develop perfectly fine InfoGrid applications with applying just the first two ideas. But the more of these code ideas users apply, the more value users get out of InfoGrid.

All information in InfoGrid is represented as objects, called MeshObjects. Each MeshObject has a unique identifier, which typically is a URL. Users can access any MeshObject in an InfoGrid application by typing its URL into the browser, or do the equivalent from user application code using an InfoGrid API. MeshObjects can relate to each other. By relating MeshObjects to each other, users can construct arbitrarily complex molecules of information from atomic MeshObjects. InfoGrid takes a different approach that turns out to be very consistent with how the web works: the information at any given URL on the web can change its type many times. A MeshObject is, conceptually, the object at that URL. So it makes sense that MeshObjects can change their type without being deleted first. In InfoGrid, types define which properties an object carries. So once users bless a MeshObject with a type, it might start carrying a few properties initialized with default values. Which properties those are depends on how users defined the type. Types are defined in as InfoGrid models. In InfoGrid, choosing a persistence alternative is essentially a configuration step, not a programming step. The InfoGrid project also has developed code that stores MeshObjects in Amazon’s S3 and in Hadoop. No application logic changes are necessary.