Fundamentally, should we be thinking of Asset relationships as a Graph?

[viztastic]

@rafehi @NRaf There's a rising notion of entities (assets, attributes) that may morph from one type to another, for example:

• a trivial asset that then becomes a fully fledged asset, or visa versa
• attributes that have streaming characteristics to attributes that don't change often, or visa versa
• asset schemas that need to be well defined but also have enough flexibility so that its composition and behaviour can change over time

There's also an inevitable need to link users to assets, and also acknoweldge that a user who may have visibility over a top level asset may not necessarily have detailed visibility of an asset's sub-components (e.g. for security reasons).

With this in mind, does it make more sense to model assets and users as graphs as opposed to strictly defined static schemas?

That's not to say relational models don't have a place, but perhaps they are secondary to the underlying graph representation of users and assets?

In technical terms.. is something like http://github.com/google/cayley suitable for this purpose?

[rafehi]

Interesting question, definitely one worth exploring. I think of particular interest is needing to traverse up a tree. e.g. if an asset doesn't specify permissions, then look at its parent asset to determine the permissions.