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Fluree Overview

Fluree is a graph data management platform for secure, shareable, composable and verifiable systems of record. It is a new category of data system that unlocks new possibilities.

While other data systems offer tradeoffs in terms of performance and data modeling, they all create data silos. Fluree is designed to let you treat disparate data sources as a single logical database - while maintaining security and privacy. It's the world's premier sharing-first database.

What sets Fluree apart?​

Two main features set Fluree apart:

  • Support for JSON-LD (JSON linked data), providing a universal system for representing and referencing data
  • Deep cryptographic integration, providing a fine-grained security model that allows any level of access within your organization or the open internet

To understand why JSON-LD is important, let's talk about how current data systems create silos. Most data systems create their own bespoke data representations; you might use address to denote a person's address in your system, while I use it to denote a URL. These representations only make sense within the context of the parent system. It's like how the word burro means donkey in Spanish and butter in Italian.

If you ask someone to pass you the butter in Italian, you are unlikely to receive a donkey. The context makes the meaning clear. JSON-LD is a web standard for supplying the context for data.

JSON-LD also provides a standard for identifying and referencing data. Whereas RDBMS's have primary and foreign keys for identifying and referencing data within the parent system, Fluree's JSON-LD integration allows you to give your entities a universal identifier. When your data has a universal identifier, any other entity can reference it, even if it doesn't belong to the same system, just as any web page can link to any other web page.

JSON-LD introduces just enough structure to power a decentralized global information repository. With it, unrelated orgs (across the world or within an enterprise) can publish datasets and you can interact with them as if they belonged to the same logical database. Because, in fact, they do, and JSON-LD provides the logical glue.

Ultimately, what's exciting about JSON-LD is not actually JSON-LD in and of itself. JSON-LD is a standard that organizations have converged on to implement an idea; the underlying idea is to enable tools to describe the full context for data so that it's universally understandable, regardless of what system it belongs to. It's a universal language for representing data, and that unlocks possibilities for collaboration and coordination that haven't been possible until until now.

With the increased ability to share data comes an increased need to secure it. In exposing your database to consumers, you need to be able to specify exactly who can access what data, and what actions they can perform.

Fluree lets you do this because it implements a data-centric approach to security, enforcing access at the data layer. This approach emphasizes the security of data itself rather than the security of applications or networks. In a data-centric security framework, security policies and protocols are defined and enforced at the data layer, rather than deferred to a server, application, or network

Data owners can manage data policies, including data access control, at the data layer in order to restrict data access at the dataset, row, column, or cell level. Data owners may define very granular and arbitrary rules to determine access privileges. Different stakeholders can define their own unique access policies around the same data, as per the requirements of their own data governance contexts or dataset-specific sharing agreements.

This data-centric framework of embedding data security policies within the data itself allows a single data set to service multiple consumers, even with varying degrees of credentialed access.

How can Fluree help you?​

Fluree unlocks new possibilities and removes old pain points.

  • Safely expose your database directly. Fluree's fine-grained security model and support for verifiable credentials let you expose your database so users can query it directly - without an intermediary API layer. Your customers will love you for giving this kind of power.
  • Compose databases across your org, or across the world. With Fluree, you can treat separate databases as if they logically belong to the same database.

Read more domain-specific use cases:

  • Fluree for software-as-a-service apps
  • Fluree for the enterprise
  • Fluree for data science
  • Fluree for researches

Feature rundown​

  • Query languages supported
    • SPARQL
    • GraphQL
    • SQL
    • FlureeQL
  • JSON-LD data representation
  • SHACL schema validation
  • Data-centric security model
  • HTTP API
  • Natively temporal with support for time travel