Grakn Labs 2017 Spring Round-up

Awesome things have been happening at Grakn Labs

Published in

Vaticle

7 min readApr 20, 2017

Spring has arrived! I feel like it has been ages since I wrote about our year in 2016. But, no, it’s only been less than four months! Nevertheless, so much has happened at Grakn Labs! So I would like to update you on all the exciting things that have been happening at Grakn Labs, which I also sent to many of you through our biggest round-up newsletter to date!

Missed our newsletter? You should sign up at grakn.ai/community

We’ve been working hard on building and improving Grakn from all your feedback and requests. We’ve now released version 0.12: a simpler, faster and smarter Grakn and we’ve discussed our novel approach for Modelling Data with Hypergraphs, in contrast to other ontology languages (*cough: OWL*).

Alongside the work we’ve been doing on the technology stack, we’ve also:

been awarded Product of the Year 2017 by the University of Cambridge
joined Startup Grind’s prestigious Top 50 Startups
exhibited at Dublin Tech Summit
shared our work with IBM Watson team at their HQ in upstate New York
gave talks at Data Day Texas and IBM InterConnect Las Vegas
we’re bringing Grakn to Google, IBM and Oracle Cloud
joined forces with Google, Hortonworks, and IBM on launching JanusGraph
started the Opensource Graph Technology Meetup community
joined DZone as most valued bloggers
passed 2K user downloads, and the community is continuing to grow.

Read on as we share our exciting news with you in detail!
PS: If you didn’t catch up with our work last year, you might find our 2016 year in review interesting.

Cambridge Computer Lab Ring: Product of the Year 2017

On Wednesday 5th of April, it was the 13th annual dinner of the University of Cambridge Computer Lab Ring — an association of 255 technology companies founded by Cambridge alumni, which includes ARM, Sophos, SwiftKey, Raspberry Pi, Improbable, and Google DeepMind. Towards the end of the of the event, we were pleasantly surprised that the Cambridge Computer Lab Ring Product of the Year 2017 was awarded to Grakn Labs for Grakn. [Read more]

Grakn 0.12: Simpler, Faster & Smarter!

A new release (0.12.0) is available to download from the usual place. You can find out about the details of the release from the release notes. In summary: we’ve made Grakn simpler with shorter and better syntax; faster by optimising the querying algorithm, reasoning algorithm, analytics computation, indexing strategy, and the underlying engine; and smarter by improving the UX on the visualisation dashboard, more fluent Java APIs, as well as the native reasoning capability to provide an explanation for the inferred results you have queried — we’re breaching new territories that database query languages have not visited before! [Install]

Modelling Data with Hypergraphs

We are often asked how Grakn’s ontology contrasts with traditional ontology languages and tools in the RDF/OWL world. We have previously touched upon why we built our own knowledge representation — in short: RDF & OWL are for the semantic web (not databases) and logicians (not software engineers). Recently, we also dove in a little deeper and discussed the practicality of Grakn’s ontology: simplicity and maintainability. And now, we share with you the engineering leap we took in the foundation of our work: Modelling Data with Hypergraphs.

Taking Distributed Knowledge-Bases to the Clouds!

At Grakn Labs, we all believe that cloud computing is the future of computing infrastructures. We are very excited by the opportunity to partner with Google Cloud at this point in the growth of our product, to provide services to our clients that leverage both the scaling capabilities of Google and intelligence of Grakn.
We’re also in the process of the deploying Grakn on Oracle Cloud and IBM Bluemix, so stay tuned for updates. By the end of this year, we plan to provide Grakn as a service on all leading cloud infrastructures for you to easily integrate with your applications. [Read more]

Opensource Graph Technology: Monthly Meetups

In January, we announced our collaboration with Expero, Google, Hortonworks and IBM on JanusGraph. We co-organised a meetup in New York on JanusGraph in early March, and its success motivated us to start Opensource Graph Technology Meetup community for learning how open source graph technologies work with highly interconnected and complex data. The London inaugural meetup in mid-March was a success, and we look forward to seeing all you the next one: Applications Built with Graphs, on the 2nd of May. [Go to Meetup]

We were one of the World’s Top 50 Startups!

Since the beginning of this year, we’ve spent many weeks on the road. We presented our work at Data Day Texas 2017; we exhibited at the AIBE Summit, WSDM Cambridge and Dublin Tech Summit; and we held talks at ThoughtWorks, as well as IBM Watson’s massive and historical HQ in upstate New York. It was a tiring couple of months, but it was truly an amazing experience which highlights a tremendous milestone of our journey, as one of the events towards the end our trip was to attend Startup Grind Global Conference in San Francisco. With over 6000 companies in the running this year, from 200 cities in 80 countries around the world, the Grakn Labs team was incredibly excited and truly honoured to be selected as the world’s Top 50 most impressive and elite companies who will join Startup Grind’s 2017 Global Startup Program. [Read more]

In case you missed the talks that Haikal has been giving in the past few months, you can catch up with his core message in this video from February’s Data Day Texas 2017.

2200+ Downloads, 100+ members, 500+ followers, and counting!
We know it’s still early days, but we can’t be more enthusiastic to see the growth and support of our community. By this 0.12 release, Grakn has been downloaded 2200 times, we’ve got more than 100 community members active in on our community Slack channel and discussion forum, and we’ve reached 500 Twitter followers. We’re very thankful for the support and feedback from all of you in our community — we continue to improve because of you. And for those of you who haven’t joined, we’d like to invite you to be part of our developer community!

We’ve heard so many of you are developing amazing things on Grakn. So starting next month, we would like to write about your work and feature it on our blog. So if you’d like to be featured, give us a shout on @GraknLabs, shoot us a message on Slack, or write to us at community@grakn.ai.

Last but not least, there’s so much more on our blog!
We are pleased to announce that we have been invited to blog over on DZone. Some of our posts have already gone live, and we look forward to working with the DZone team in future to syndicate our very best content onto their zones. Speaking of which, over on the blog in the last few weeks, we have published some very cool articles covering a range of topics:

So that’s what we were busy with this past winter. I hope you enjoyed catching up with all the things we’ve done. Stay tuned for more updates in the Autumn!