A James Green

Alastair Green alastair@acm.org. Resident in London, England.

This user has publicly declared that they have a conflict of interest regarding the Wikipedia article GQL Graph Query Language.

The information given below goes into details which are intended to help reviewers and readers of a proposed article on GQL understand

• my status as a Subject Matter Expert on GQL
• the reason for the Conflict of Interest declaration made above.
• my record in maintaining vendor neutrality in the context of collaborative standards work involving competitors, which will be applied to authorship of the planned article on GQL.

Until 31 December 2019 I was an employee of Neo4j Inc., a software vendor which produces and sells graph data management products. I still represent Neo4j Inc on the board of Linked Data Benchmark Council.

I am a part-time researcher, currently working on a PhD at the Department of Computer Science at Birkbeck College, University of London.

In both capacities I have an interest in, and special knowledge of graph query and schema language design and standards development.

My primary responsibility for the past two years has been to work with other companies, researchers and standards professionals to create a new International Standard, parallel to SQL, to consolidate and draw inspiration from five existing property graph query languages (SQL/PGQ, PGQL from Oracle, Cypher from openCypher community, originally from Neo4j, G-CORE from LDBC and GSQL from TigerGraph Inc.) A project within ISO/IEC JTC 1 has recently (September 2019) been started after a ballot of national standards bodies belonging to JTC 1.

As an employee (employed from April 2016 to date), I have represented Neo4j as a primary participant in the U.S. standards body INCITS DM32 Data Management, and as a U.S. national expert in meetings of ISO/IEC JTC 1 SC32 and its WG3 Database Languages technical committee which produces the SQL standard, and is now also working on the GQL Graph Query Language standard project. Similarly, I represent Neo4j UK Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of Neo4j Inc. as a director of Linked Data Benchmark Council (LDBC), a non-profit company whose members are companies, researchers and consultants which produce or use RDF, property graph and SQL. LDBC "task forces" or working groups are involved in community discussions on the GQL standard, and I am actively involved in those discussions.

I have also been responsible, as part of a team at Neo4j Inc, for design proposals and community organizing of the openCypher Implementers Group which is an informal group of individuals and companies which use and develop the Cypher query language including companies which are competitors to Neo4j.

I co-chaired the 2019 W3C workshop on the W3C Workshop on Web Standards for Graph Data Management, in March 2019. Again I was paid by Neo4j for my involvement in that activity. In that role and in blog posts on the progress of the multi-party effort to create the GQL standards project within ISO/IEC JTC 1 I have been careful to act as a trusted and reasonably neutral co-ordinator of, and communicator of, the efforts of many companies and researchers internationally in this area of my special expertise.