In a project, I need to keep track of complex attributes of things, composed of (at least) a value and a unit, or even a value, a unit (like '10 mm'), allowed tolerances, min and max values etc.
What are the experiences in the community with using either properties on a node (prop1_val, prop1_unit, prop2_val, ... etc) or nodes describing the attribute (where the property names can stay the same for all the nodes).
My understanding is that there will be a tradeoff for 'self-containedness' vs. speed & ease of querying. I'm grateful for any insights!
I think you're going to better off putting the properties on one node rather than using other nodes to describe the properties. That way you only have to query the one node to get the information you want rather than trying to aggregate a number of nodes to get the properties.
If you mean that the 'thing' node would contain the properties, then would it be a useful intermediate step to contain all properties together on a 'properties' node linked to the 'thing' by a HAS_PROPERTIES relationship?
The inclusion of a relationship that can hold an additional dimension of data could be useful.
