Panel: Evaluating Your Graph Database Options

There are numerous technical considerations when selecting a graph database, as the capabilities and relative advantages of different products are rich and varied. In this panel we'll talk about those options with four major players in the graph database market.

William McKnight is President of McKnight Consulting Group (www.mcknightcg.com). He is an internationally recognized authority in information management. His consulting work has included many of the Global 2000 and numerous mid-market companies. His teams have won several best practice competitions for their implementations, and many of his clients have gone public with their success stories. His strategies form the information management plan for leading companies in various industries. William is author of several books including “Integrating Hadoop" and “Information Management: Strategies for Gaining a Competitive Advantage with Data." He has authored benchmarks on Hadoop and Cloud Databases and published the GigaOM Sector Roadmap on Analytic Cloud Databases. He has published over 25 white papers, and his blog has been syndicated for many years. William is a very popular speaker worldwide, having given well over 100 days of training on diverse data subjects NoSQL, Graph Databases, Data Governance, Data Architecture, Data Return on Investment, Agile Methodology, Organizational Change Management, and Master Data Management. William is a mentor in information for a startup accelerator. William has taught at Santa Clara University, UC-Berkeley, and UC-Santa Cruz, and has consulted in over a dozen countries. He provides clients with strategies, architectures, platform and tool selection, and complete programs to excel with information.

Mr. Bryan B. Thompson has 30 years experience in small business, government, and the private sector with a focus in applied research and development and emerging technology. He is the co-founder and Chief Scientist of SYSTAP, LLC. He was the co-founder, President and CTO of GlobalWisdom, Inc., and an Executive Vice President and Senior Scientist with Cognitive Technologies, Inc. His technical background includes expertise in cloud computing; the semantic web; web architecture; relational, object, and RDF database architectures; knowledge management and collaboration; artificial intelligence and connectionist models; natural language processing; metrics, scalability studies, benchmarks and performance tuning; decision support systems; and usability design. His work for the last several years has focused on assessing and applying Semantic Web technologies to support semantics-based federation of disparate data sources for the Intelligence Community. Mr. Thompson is the chief architect of bigdata.

Brian Clark has nearly 30 years of software and technology experience, and was one of the early architects of Objectivity/DB. Before joining Objectivity, Brian worked at Automation Technology Products, providing leading tools in the MCAD market. Prior to that, he was with Project Management Services at International Computers Limited, one of Europe's leading computer companies at the time. Brian holds a B.S. degree in Computer Science from Sheffield University, England.

Andreas Kollegger is a leading speaker and writer on graph databases and Neo4j and the bridge between community and developer efforts. He works actively in the community, appearing at meetups around the world and promotes the larger Neo4j ecosystem of projects.

Michael Grove is the Chief Software Architect/VP of Engineering at Clark & Parsia, LLC. A graduate of the University of Maryland, College Park with a degree in Computer Science, he first joined the team in November 2005. In addition to providing day-to-day technical guidance across the organization, Michael is the primary developer of Stardog.