Blue Brain Nexus: An open, secure, scalable system for knowledge graph management and data-driven science

Abstract

Modern data-driven science often consists of iterative cycles of data discovery, acquisition, preparation, analysis, model building and validation leading to knowledge discovery as well as dissemination at scale. The unique challenges of building and simulating the whole rodent brain in the Swiss EPFL Blue Brain Project (BBP) required a solution to managing large-scale highly heterogeneous data, and tracking their provenance to ensure quality, reproducibility and attribution throughout these iterative cycles. Here, we describe Blue Brain Nexus (BBN), an ecosystem of open source, domain agnostic, scalable, extensible data and knowledge graph management systems built by BBP to address these challenges. BBN builds on open standards and interoperable semantic web technologies to enable the creation and management of secure RDF-based knowledge graphs validated by W3C SHACL. BBN supports a spectrum of (meta)data modeling and representation formats including JSON and JSON-LD as well as more formally specified SHACL-based schemas enabling domain model-driven runtime API. With its streaming event-based architecture, BBN supports asynchronous building and maintenance of multiple extensible indices to ensure high performance search capabilities and enable analytics. We present four use cases and applications of BBN to large-scale data integration and dissemination challenges in computational modeling, neuroscience, psychiatry and open linked data.