Content Database System

The data collected and used by the other SPIRIT tools is managed in a graph database system that has been designed for the purposes of SPIRIT. This system consists of three components: The first component is the SPIRIT content database that contains data about investigations, about the media files discovered and used during the investigations, and about the social graph.

Logically, this database is represented using the Property Graph data model.

The second component is the database management system used to store the content database, for which SPIRIT employs ArangoDB which is a scalable multi- model NoSQL system that supports a suitable graph database model, as well as desirable transactional properties (ACID). The third component is a mediator service that provides a GraphQL API to enable the other SPIRIT tools to access the content database (queries and updates). This mediator service has been developed to provide the basis to add further abstraction layers to the graph database system. Such abstraction layers i) capture the semantics of the data via an ontology (to enable semantics-based graph analysis and sense making) and ii) include computational logic (graph traversal & analytics algorithms).