GRAKN.AI Announces Collaboration with Expero, Google, Hortonworks and IBM on JanusGraph

The future of open-source graph databases

As a company, we take great pride in supporting the open source movement — from contributing to open source communities to offering our own open source technology: GRAKN.AI.

GRAKN.AI itself depends on TitanDB, an open source graph database implementing the Apache TinkerPop API and running on several NoSQL backends, such as Apache Cassandra, Apache HBase, and Berkeley DB.

Originally developed by Aurelius, Titan has been one of the most successful open source distributed graph databases. It has seen wide industry adoption and has a growing community since its inception. We have made extensive use of its indexing functionality, enabling us to increase performance, as well as its GraphComputer, enabling our own analytics platform. Like Titan, we are also striving to be vendor agnostic with the help of the TinkerPop API.

Since Datastax’s acquisition of Aurelius in February 2015, the development of Titan has slowed, with the last update to the repo being done in June 2016. Since that time, we have seen questions regarding the future of Titan and its maintenance.

Today, we are happy to announce our collaboration with a new community of individuals and companies, including Expero, Google, Hortonworks and IBM, in launching JanusGraph, a new fork of Titan under The Linux Foundation. This projects aims to continue development and advance the landscape for open source graph databases.

Janus is a Roman god of beginnings and endings, but most importantly transitions. We thought this name would be appropriate, as Titan transitions into something new and exciting.

All are welcome to join us on this new endeavour. JanusGraph will be welcoming features, bug fixes, documentation improvements, and much more. Get involved by taking a look at the project website and browse the code on GitHub.

We look forward to working together on continuing the advancement of graph databases!