The Global Graph Summit (GGS) 2020 in Austin is one of the few conferences with a focus on graph databases, algorithms and everything related to graph computation. This year I presented the joint effort of G DATA CyberDefense and Expero Inc. to build a graph user-interface for our threat intelligence database. The technology used to create the GraphQL backend and corresponding web-frontend was the focus of the presentation.
If you follow G DATA CyberDefense for a while, you notice that we are one of the biggest contributors to the JanusGraph database and the Apache Tinkerpop stack. We have already written a bunch of post about the topic:
Due to the heavy investment of G DATA into the graph database topic, we have connected with a lot of people from the graph computation scene. The annual GGS is the place to meet them and hear the newest advances in graph technology. For me, it is always a lot of fun to gather some new ideas for our tooling and to discuss technical difficulties with experts from all around the world. This year was special though, as I presented our newest piece of work together with Ethan Hasson from Expero. Towards the end of 2019, we built a user-interface for the browser together with Expero to allow easy threat discovery in our graph database. The collaboration with Ethan was a great experience. Even though the Atlantic Ocean lies between the headquarters of G DATA and Expero, we created a talk in no time. Prior to this year’s GGS I had never met Ethan in person as we communicated only over video chat.
Before the talk, I was unsure how many people would attend, as they were four more talks parallel to ours, but eventually my worries turned out to be completely unfounded. A lot of people came and we had a few interesting questions and discussions after the talk. I attended the GGS for the third time and my impression is that it has grown a lot since 2017 when I attended the first time. A lot of big players have joined the graph community, but most work is still done by small and specialized companies or companies completely unrelated to graph technology, like G DATA. We are a security company and got into graph databases more by accident to solve one of our business cases. That we are now one of the biggest contributors makes me proud of my team and I hope to present a lot more interesting graph technology topics in the future with them on the GGS.
