Towards the Internet of Water: Using graph databases for hydrological analysis on the Flemish river system. Issue 6 (16th July 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Bollen, Erik; Hendrix, Rik; Kuijpers, Bart; Vaisman, Alejandro
• Is Part Of: Transactions in GIS. Volume 25:Issue 6(2021)
• Page Start: 2907
• Page End: 2938
• Publication Date: 2021-07-16
• Subjects: Geographic information systems -- Periodicals; 910.285
• DOI: 10.1111/tgis.12801
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1361-1682

Abstract

Abstract: The "Internet of Water" project will deploy 2, 500 sensors along the Flemish river system, in Belgium. These sensors will be part of a monitoring system. This will produce an enormous amount of data, on which prediction and analysis tasks can be performed. To represent, store, and query river data, relational databases are normally used. However, this choice introduces an "impedance mismatch" between the conceptual representation (typically a graph) and the storage model (relational tables). To solve this problem, this article proposes to use graph databases. The Flemish river system is presented as a use case and the Neo4j graph database and its high‐level query language, Cypher, are used for storing and querying the data, respectively. A relational alternative is implemented over the PostgreSQL database. A collection of representative queries of interest for hydrologists is defined over both database implementations.