Bio4j: A Protein Querying and Management Framework

An interesting project surfaced in the last couple of days, Bio4j. What is Bio4j?

Bio4j provides a completely new and powerful framework for protein related information querying and management.

What is interesting from a NoSQL perspective is their usage of Neo4j as their storage engine. Why would they want to use a graph database?

Since it relies on a high-performance graph engine, data is stored in a way that semantically represents its own structure. On the contrary, traditional relational databases must flatten the data they represent into tables, creating “artificial” ids in order to connect the different tuples; which can in some cases eventually lead to domain models that have almost nothing to do with the actual structure of data.

Read more: Bio4j