There is an ISO-standardized graph query language: Prolog and its decidable fragment Datalog, both widely used (relatively) for decades. Will the new language be based on it?
Another question is whether the model having driven ISO standardization in the past (software vendors working together to create a large, visible, and diverse market) is still relevant in post-standard cloud times. I sure hope it is, but we haven't seen public demand for standards (with the exception of web standards) for well over a decade now.
Not Prolog, but it's a mathematical treatment of DBs with Category Theory.
A paper by these folks was mentioned in a sib comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21005452 ) "Algebraic Property Graphs"
Joshua Shinavier, Ryan Wisnesky
(Submitted on 11 Sep 2019) Last week!
> In this paper, we use algebraic data types to define a formal basis for the property graph data models supported by popular open source and commercial graph databases. Developed as a kind of inter-lingua for enterprise data integration, algebraic property graphs encode the binary edges and key-value pairs typical of property graphs, and also provide a well-defined notion of schema and support straightforward mappings to and from non-graph datasets, including relational, streaming, and microservice data commonly encountered in enterprise environments. We propose algebraic property graphs as a simple but mathematically rigorous bridge between graph and non-graph data models, broadening the scope of graph computing by removing obstacles to the construction of virtual graphs.
I think the cloud times renews the need for standards. Ten years ago devs in the linux/BSD world had the vast majority of the code that would make up our stack, from OS kernel to the front end (with perhaps some proprietary driver or external API call here or there).
The code was the standard, which traded easy readability for complete accuracy and transparency.
That's emphatically not what a standard is about. Standards in the field you described were developed over many years by proprietary Unix vendors (including BSD as descendents of the original TCP/IP stack), enshrined in POSIX/SUS (also published as Open Group and ISO standards), and then implemented on Linux. Apart from early RedHat stuff such as PAM and things like LSB, it is only since about 2005 or so that Linux dominates the market by de-facto implementations rather than standards (such as bash, Docker-style containers based on Linux namespaces, etc.)
Of course that's not what a standard is about, but I believe it's what happened for technologies during the time that standards fell off.
I identified 2009 as about when you expected de facto open source implementations instead of any talk of standards but I would buy 2005 as well. Obviously it's a fuzzy boundary.
Very true. Any graph query language that's not clearly derived from Prolog is unworthy of the title. Prolog is a lousy way to store data, but it's by far the most elegant way to query a database, and the only sensible way to query a graph.
Standards happen when the time is right. Property graphs have been in the making and matured for the last 10+ years, driven by Neo4j, other vendors, and the community and are going to stay. It's a sign of success that the SQL standards committee recognized this development by starting the GQL project.
Ha. When I was reading Prolog books this year, I couldn’t help but think how cool would it be to hook it up with a Neo4j backend. With your comment, I guess I wasn’t the only one thinking this
Another question is whether the model having driven ISO standardization in the past (software vendors working together to create a large, visible, and diverse market) is still relevant in post-standard cloud times. I sure hope it is, but we haven't seen public demand for standards (with the exception of web standards) for well over a decade now.