Developing the collection graph

Purpose – In 2010 the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) was funded to support research into the Holocaust. The project follows on from significant efforts in the past to develop and record the collections of the Holocaust in several national initiatives. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the efforts by EHRI to create a flexible research environment using graph databases. The authors concentrate on the added features and design decisions to enable efficient processing of collection information as a graph. Design/methodology/approach – The paper concentrates on the specific customisations EHRI had to develop, as the graph database approach is new, and the authors could not rely on existing solutions. The authors describe the serialisations of collections in the graph to provide for efficient processing. Because the EHRI infrastructure is highly distributed, the authors also had to invest a lot of effort into reliable distributed access control mechanisms. Finally, the authors analyse...