History

NEAT emerged from years of experience in semantic tooling and knowledge graph development. The foundation was laid in 2020 with sheet2rdf, an Excel-based tool that trained data stewards to build domain-specific knowledge graphs and supported CI/CD processes in the Dutch Covid program and european wind energy community.

By mid of 2022, sheet2rdf was used in several POCs in Cognite. As Cognite's Data Modeling Service (DMS) development progressed, the need for simplified data modeling experience led to demonstration of proto-NEAT, known as sheet2fdm, an extension of sheet2rdf, enabling semantic data model definitions in OWL, SHACL, Python and GraphQL (see e.g., wind energy data model) using a simplified version of sheet2rdf Excel template.

Presented in various forums in 2022, this approach paved the way for NEAT’s formal development in November 2022 to enable cost-saving and empowerment of Cognite's customers to self-sufficiently maintain and onboard knowledge graphs to Cognite Data Fusion. From the end of 2022 until the end of 2024, NEAT development was funded initially by Statnett (2022 - 2023), and then by Aker Solutions (2023 - 2024).

In autumn 2025, following the formation of dedicated team for CDF tooling, we have refactored NEAT and released its first official version 1 that is formally a product offering of Cognite. The version 1 of NEAT is scoped down to only physical data modeling capabilities. However, all the other features of legacy version are accessible, and will be over time ported to the version 1 (see Roadmap for details).