How has building on a graph database technology enabled unique user experiences with Athens Research in the past?

From the developer/builder’s point of view, graph databases, like a lot of NoSQL databases, are just very flexible. They allow for a faster iteration cycle. The end product we were providing was more of a graph being surfaced to the users. That’s what was interesting or unique about Athens. We were providing features like bidirectional links, properties, relationships, and nodes to users as an end user feature, which hasn't really been done up until this point for your everyday consumer.

A bidirectional link is similar to a relationship that you might see between graph theory. It's just a nice way of organizing stuff for people that are generalists—let's say like a product manager who has to work with designers/developers as well as a go-to-market team. A system like Jira is not really conducive to that—it's more for bugs and tickets and low level issues. Then design doesn't even really have their own project work system, so things tend to default to Google Docs or Notion or Slack and really long Zoom meetings or something like that. 

But when you have something that's touching on a lot of different fields or disciplines, having a graph is a really helpful way of organizing pretty much heterogeneous data types and data sources.