What is the advantage of expressing data as nodes and edges?

Expressing data as nodes and edges brings in a lot of advantages when the relationship between any two items (entities) are equally or much more important than the entities.

Nodes: They refer to people, products, cities, documents etc (essentially nouns); whereas,

Edges: represent the relationship between them. For instance (friend of, bought, located in etc.)

Main advantages

1. Natural representation of connected data

Many real-world situations and systems are much better understood as networks. For example:

• Social networks: people → friends, father of, child of etc.
• Transportation systems: cities → routes

A graph models (represents) the above in a naturally intuitive way, without forcing them into a tabular format.

2. Easy Relationship Traversal

There are many questions like the below one that are answered efficiently with the help of a graph structure.

• What all products were bought along with a laptop