The Weekly Edge: Graph Size Matters, TuringDB, & (Somehow) Guy Fieri [15 August 2025]

Welcome back to the Weekly Edge, your regular human-curated review of what’s happening in the world of graph tech from the past week(-ish) and brought to you by gdotv. 

This edition has got lots of graph goodies for you across the LPG and semantic spaces with plenty to show for the ongoing ascent of knowledge graphs:

• A contrarian KG discussion by Ashleigh Faith 
• A blisteringly hot new graph database enters the chat
• An almost-academic read on KG-powered criminal network analysis by Dr. Alessandro Negro
• A new sandbox for the GraphDB semantic graph database
• A fun make-your-own, choose-your-own-adventure game

Let’s get into it. 

Video: Size Matters…When It Comes to Knowledge Graphs

It’s a debate as old as time: Does graph size matter? It absolutely does, argues famous knowledge graph expert and YouTuber Ashleigh Faith in her latest video. The ideal size? Smaller is better (no, really).

Ashleigh makes the case for small knowledge graphs on the basis of accuracy, precision, latency, query times, and cost. And if your knowledge graph is already too big to handle? She’ll walk you through how to bring it down to size. Worth a watch.

If you haven’t heard of Ashleigh already, then definitely subscribe to her channel for more KG expertise. She once worked on a product called “Alexa.” You might have heard of it.

New Graph Database Just Dropped: TuringDB

It seems like every other week now that a new graph database enters the chat, and this is one of those weeks: Please welcome TuringDB to the graph tech ecosystem! 

Co-Founder Adam Amara threw down the gauntlet with this badass banger of an opening line in the official release announcement: “We couldn’t find a graph database fast enough, so we built one.” 

According to the TuringDB team, TuringDB is the high-performance, in-memory graph database engine behind the Turing Biosystems platform. It was built to make real-time graph analytics effortless with 1-50 ms queries on graphs with 10 million+ nodes. If you’re interested, sign up for early access to TuringDB here.

In-Depth Read: AI-Powered Intelligence Synthesis Using Knowledge Graphs & LLMs

If there were a Sorcerer Supreme of graph technology, it would probably be Dr. Alessandro Negro, the Chief Scientist at GraphAware. This week’s deep read is Part 3 of a 4-part article series in which Alessandro breaks down the conceptual foundation and the technical implementation of criminal network analysis using AI-powered intelligence synthesis. (Catch up with Part 1 and Part 2 here; Part 4 still to come.)

It’s a heady, in-depth, keep-up-or-fall-behind read on using knowledge graphs and LLMs to actually catch the bad guys. If you’re looking for a graph walkthrough you can really sink your teeth into, this is one you shouldn’t skip.

Try It Out: Explore GraphDB in the New Graphwise Sandbox

In case you stepped out to get some popcorn earlier, I’ll catch you up: In late 2024, two long-time semantic technology players Ontotext and Semantic Web Company got married and formed the new semantic powerhouse Graphwise. Since then, they’ve been cranking out some pretty interesting stuff.

They recently announced the Graphwise Sandbox, a self-service environment to try out GraphDB (their semantic graph database) on an isolated demo project with lots of interactive guidance and pre-loaded datasets. It’s a great way to take GraphDB for a test ride that gets you up and going in less than 3 minutes. 

For Fun: A Graph-Powered Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Engine

If you make your own choose-your-own-adventure story, does that make it a choose-your-own-choose-your-own-adventure? Truly, a question for the philosophers. Regardless, we recently stumbled upon Cherry Blossom: a choose-your-adventure/visual novel engine built on React with TypeScript. 

Cherry Blossom is the game engine behind the “For the Love of Fieri” dating simulator where you play as Guy Fieri dating hot foods around town…. and at this point I feel like we’ve lost the plot. (Fair warning: the game comes with an NSFW label, so we’re not linking to it.)

Back to graph: For those of you wanting to build your own choose-your-own-adventure game the Cherry Blossom engine is powered by an `EventGraph` and includes graph visualizations to help you (or your players) navigate the twists, turns, and options of your game – which hopefully has nothing to do with Guy Fieri’s dating life. 

P.S. In last week’s edition, we briefly featured Hydra.  Since then, my colleague Amber wrote a stellar first look at the Hydra project – a new graph programming language – that’s definitely worth a read.

P.S. P.S. In last week’s edition, we also mentioned the Knowledge Graph Lite article series by Jessica Talisman. The third and final part is now out!

That’s it for this week’s edition. Got something you want to nominate for inclusion in a future edition of the Weekly Edge? Ping us on on X | Bluesky | LinkedIn or email weeklyedge@gdotv.com.