Building Knowledge Graphs with Neo4j for CAD Documentation: A Practical Guide

Your CAD documentation lives in scattered PDFs, tribal knowledge, and that one engineer's head who's about to retire. When someone asks "which parts use this bearing specification?" or "what assemblies will break if we change this tolerance?", the answer takes hours of archaeology through disconnected systems. A spec change that should take minutes to assess becomes a multi-day investigation across spreadsheets, file servers, and hallway conversations. Knowledge graphs solve this by making relationships between CAD entities queryable, traversable, and explicit. The knowledge graph approach transforms documentation from static files into a living network of connected information. Instead of searching through folders hoping to find the right document, engineers query the graph directly: "Show me everything connected to this bearing." The graph returns not just the bearing's specification sheet, but every assembly using it, every tolerance that depends on it, and every engineer who has mo