Perspectives

What makes a good datamodel? – Point 5: Accessible

What makes a good datamodel?

Murray Callander

June 25, 2020

Having the best datamodel in the world won’t help you grow your digital capabilities if the only way to access it is through proprietary drivers.

Being accessible means two things:

Using web APIs so that any system can access it; and

Structuring the data in a standard format

Whatever system you choose to build your data model in needs to have REST APIs, and this is really standard practice in software development now anyway.

Structuring the data in a standard format is a bit harder as in reality this is no one standard. There are various contenders from OPC UA to BIM and ODATA.

At Eigen we solve these problems by using Neo4j as our preferred home for Data Models. As an opensource technology it ensures that our customers are not locked in and can always access the data independently of our systems.

Neo4j has direct APIs and we build our own APIs on top of it that can serve up contextualised data according to the format required.

Written by

Murray Callander

Posted on

June 25, 2020

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What makes a good datamodel? – Point 2: Flexible

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