Analytics Modernization Success Stories

Natalie Clark

Mar 18, 2021, 2 minute read

Contemplating upgrading your product portfolio with a knowledge graph? Read on to hear how a Stardog customer has delivered delightful user experiences and new features to their customer bases, thanks to Stardog.

Springer Nature

In 2016, Springer Nature, one of the world’s largest academic publishers, diversified their product offerings to include subscription based datasets and databases. Their Database and Solutions offering provides consistent, complete, and on-demand data from a combination of diverse data sources centered around a particular topic.

The Database Group manages the tools and infrastructure that serve as the backbone to the platform. To bring together the variety of discrete data sources that are incorporated into these subscription based datasets, the DG team originally relied on robust XML document store and keyword/element builds. However, the legacy infrastructure required time-intensive updates and was outgrown by the demands of users and internal needs. As the team brought on more data sources to integrate into the platform, developed novel features for search and interaction, and updated existing data with new research, the connections within the infrastructure strained under the pressure of the ever-evolving data slowing down their release cadence.

The Stardog difference: Stardog’s semantic graph model is inherently more flexible than relational, XML, or even property graph models. Learn more about the benefits of the semantic graph model and how they support data reusability, dramatically reducing the time needed to execute changes or iterate on existing models.

To meet end-user and internal requirements, the Database Group needed a flexible and dynamic data infrastructure that allowed easy iterations and updates within existing data while also providing context embedded within search results to end-users. By unifying their data in Stardog, the Database Group created a single declarative model to bring all the connections between the content into a unified view.

“Deploying on Stardog fosters the idea of reusability among the mapping and vocabularies within the database products. Stardog makes large-scale graph data management possible for Springer Nature — and propels our data-modeling and data-integration efforts to a completely new level.”

Marcel Karnstedt-Hulpus, Director Data & Knowledge Technologies DRG

Products including SpringerMaterials, Springer Nature Experiments, and Nano now all run on Stardog. The native flexibility of a knowledge graph allows Springer Nature to make continuous additions and adjustments to the data as more discoveries are made, their proprietary datasets grow, and new data sources emerge.