Case Study: University of Washington achieves unified, visual metadata discovery with Neo4j

University of Washington - Customer Case Study

At the University of Washington, Solutions Architect Pieter Visser and his IT team serving the business side faced a persistent problem: off‑the‑shelf metadata tools and relational databases couldn’t reliably connect diverse metadata or cope with constantly changing schemas, leaving end users unable to find or understand the data in their enterprise warehouse and BI tools.

They built a custom metadata repository on Neo4j that connects any node to any other and presents relationships visually, making metadata accessible and contextual for end users. The graph approach enabled new use cases—mixing metadata with security and org data to create a semantic discretionary access control layer and to power report recommendations—and unlocked broader analysis across data sources; the team also learned to simplify their data model (avoiding early versioning) and is focused on improving visual query UIs.

University of Washington

Pieter Visser

Solutions Architect