An Evaluation of Graph Databases and Object-Graph Mappers in CIDOC CRM-Compliant Digital Archives

The Portuguese General Directorate for Book, Archives and Libraries (DGLAB) has selected CIDOC CRM as the basis its next-generation digital archive management software. Given ontological foundations of Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), a graph database or triplestore was seen best candidate to represent CRM-based data model new We thus decided compare several these databases, based on their maturity, features, performance in standard tasks and, most importantly, Object-Graph Mappers (OGM) available interact with each an object-oriented way. Our conclusions are drawn not only from systematic review related works but experimental scenario. For our experiment, we designed simple CRM-compliant test ability OGM/database combination tackle so-called “diamond-problem” Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) ensure that property instances follow domain range constraints. results show (1) consistency enforcement databases triplestores is much harder achieve than relational database, making them more suited analytical rather transactional role; (2) OGMs still immature solutions; (3) neomodel, OGM Neo4j mature solution study it satisfies all requirements, although also least performing.