What ways of encoding/holding metadata and type of nodes and properties are there?
There are a number of interesting approaches to this, involving both holding the metadata in the graph and outside the graph (in code): • Use the navigational context This approach builds on the basic assumption that you know the type of the properties if you know the type that the node represents an instance of (the “type of the node”). The type of the node is deduced from how the node is reached. From a node of a known type you know the type of each node at the other end of a relationship based on the type of the relationship. This means that given a start node if a known type you will know the type of all nodes you can reach from it. In order to know the type of a start node you can use different indexes for different types, so that the nodes in one specific index always represents the same type. To differentiate between subtypes some of the other approches can be used. See http://lists.neo4j.org/pipermail/user/2008-October/000848.html • RDF and OWL basically, every node will mainta
