CODEWITHSUNDEEP
neo4jontologyspring-data-neo4j
boceckts
boceckts

Reputation: 1

Dynamic Spring Data Classes for Neo4J based on an Ontology

I have to create a web service that needs to interact with a Neo4J database using the Spring framework with Spring-Data-Neo4J. This requires a static data domain model, e.g. defined labels, relations, properties.

The Problem is, that my data is based on an Ontology (via the neosemantics plugin) which could be modified in the future. It would be great if the application could automatically adopt to it. This way, the data model could be extended by editing the ontology only and no additional programming knowledge would be necessary.

Does this mean I have to generate the Spring data classes dynamically (based on the Ontology) or is there a better way to achieve this with Spring-Data-Neo4J (or should I use a different framework)?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 202

Answers (2)

boceckts
boceckts

Reputation: 1

I ended up using the Java neo4j driver instead of Spring-Data-Neo4jand a generic node class implementation only having the fields id, list of labels and a map of properties. The set labels and properties can be checked against the ontology prior to creating the nodes in the database. This way I can enforce a specific set of node labels and properties by only modifying the ontology and without having to generate the specific Spring-Data-Neo4j data classes.

Upvotes: 0

cybersam
cybersam

Reputation: 66989

Sure, you could come up with a way to generate a set of classes from an ontology. But that is probably going to present more problems than it solves.

An automatically-generated set of classes may not correspond to an appropriate data model for your use cases. The determination of the appropriate data model still requires a human.

Also, the new classes may be incompatible with the existing client code. And you may have to migrate the existing DB over to the new data model. Fixing all that requires humans as well.

Upvotes: 0

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