Why Young Developers Don’t Get Knowledge Graphs

Dr. Aasman recently interviewed for this Datanami article.

Business is booming these days for graph databases–maybe it took COVID to show us how connected everything is–and that’s good news for Franz, which develops a semantic graph database called AllegroGraph. Just the same, you won’t find CEO Jans Aasman spending much time convincing developers of a certain age to use it.

“If you live in our world of semantic graph databases, I only talked to people over 35, 40,” Aasman tells Datanami. “I never talk to young developers.”

The problem with younger developers, he explains, is that they’re usually interested in using the graph database to build point solutions to solve specific problems, as opposed to creating a wide base of knowledge that can not only solve a specific problem, but be used with future solutions too. Plus, building point solutions exacerbates the data silo problem, he says.

“In our community of the semantic graph databases, literally everything is about integration and making sure that everything can interoperate,” the Franz CEO continues. “And there’s not a single young programmer that cares about that. Seriously. You’re young, you want to do a fun project, your managers are saying, in three months I need this thing done. You do whatever you want to do. Well, they get it done. And then you have new a data silo.”

Read the full article at Datanami.