In Episode 65 of Razorleaf’s Stay Sharp podcast, What’s Coming in 2025 in Digital Engineering, co-hosts Jen Ferello and Jonathan Scott are joined by prominent blogger and industry expert Oleg Shilovitsky. Together, they cover the big trends they see ahead for the digital engineering and manufacturing arena, as well as what they think might “get more real in 2025.”
The Big One: Graph Technology
Oleg starts with one of his favorite topics: graph models and databases. He came to graph technology from his decades-long interest in semantic technology, the tools and methods that help machines understand data. As he explains it, “Semantic web technology is all about how to understand relationships between different websites and different web pages where data is located.”
Graph technology provides an alternative to the traditional means of storing and joining data between relational databases, which provide structured, pre-defined relationships between data in tables and are more suited for simple, well-defined data structures. After starting out as simple files, data became richer as PLM and other systems, for example, began adding metadata to their CAD files. This in turn created a need for a storage technology that would enable organizations to use the data more flexibly and use it in more locations and ways. Graph allows for that flexibility, by representing data as nodes—and the relationships between data as edges—which is better suited for complex, interconnected data and efficient querying of relationships between nodes. “The graph is the best expression of relationships between topics, objects, and anything you can think about,” Oleg says.
Thanks to graph technology, Oleg goes on, “The database stopped being a single foundation of everything and just became a tool to store data.” The giant leap forward here is that with graph, multiple data storage technologies can be used within a single system, while still sharing data, mapping all relationships, and allowing each database type to be optimized for particular needs. “The graph database is a very interesting and unique tool,” Oleg says,” capable of doing things that no one else in other databases can do.” The example he shares is running a query to find items in a database that aren’t used by any products or bills of materials. While that would be a challenging task to sift through big data sets in a SQL query, it’s two simple lines of code in Cypher, a language optimized for graph databases.
Oleg’s opinion is that the graph model gives the data expressiveness, and the graph database “gives you a specific type of operations and specific optimized performance.” The technology is especially valuable because “the same graph model is used in the large language models as a neural network for AI,” he says. “That’s where the big innovation is coming, because I want my data contextualized with the AI technology, and that’s why, again, graphs are sitting in the middle of everything.” And why they’re going to be even more important in 2025.
The Expansion of Support for Collaboration
Another trend the trio discuss is the idea of multidisciplinary projects and managing their data—aka, the end of traditional files and check-in/check-out practices. Oleg says, “If I come with this reality that some systems work differently, some are managing files, some of them are managing data already, and then we have software engineers that are managing projects differently, and then we have electronics … we need to have a better model for collaboration.”
To create that, “We need to create space where all engineers or anyone else will be able to go to. A shared collaborative space where people can make changes,” he says. “And then once we are ready to make a revision—or in change management and configuration management, it’s called a baseline. When we’re ready to create the baseline, we save it. That’s the paradigm shift.” The two technological challenges to creating this collaboration model that Oleg identifies are first, the different parts of the industry using many different systems, and second, a mechanism that will capture data from multiple systems and manage the workspace. In keeping with the theme of the episode, Oleg says that graph technologies are what can overcome those issues and change the way people work today.
Learn More About What’s Ahead
The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including how the schema.org initiative could change the way different systems in your digital thread communicate and link together, how graph technology will make it easier to get your data into AI to harvest its insights, how graphs are the universal hammer that can make every data challenge a nail, and more.
Check out the full conversation in Stay Sharp Episode 65: What’s Coming in 2025 in Digital Engineering, and join us each week for a new podcast.
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