Hi, I come from a background where binary relationships between items have (usually) different semantics in both directions. Our metamodel has a relationship type, forward meaning and backward (or reverse or inverse) meaning; thus, a relationship type of "Composition" has a forward meaning of "composes into" and a backward meaning of "is composed of" (or even "composes".
Our database will store metadata in the Corporate Metadata Repository (CMR). (in this case Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect)
We intend to synchronise metadata between the two repositories. We have determined that we should set the Neo4j relationship type to (in this case) :COMPOSITION. We will create two properties for each instance forwardMeaning and backwardMeaning, to hold the descriptive names of the relationship to allow us to set the styles for the graphs to show the appropriate property (as desired by the user).
This repetition causes the "denormalisation" of what is essentially metadata into the actual relationship links. Is there any way to reduce this? In the CMR, this is achieved by a metadata entry for the relationship type, and thus it is automatically made available to the specific links.
TIA,
Paolo