The Spring Data Graph project applies core Spring concepts to the development of solutions using a graph style data store. The basic approach is to mark simple POJO entities with Spring Data Graph annotations. That enables the AspectJ aspects that are contained with the framework to adapt the instantiation and field access to have them stored and retrieved from the graph store. Entities are mapped to nodes of the graph, references to other entities are represented by relationships. There are also special relationship entities that provide access to the properties of graph relationships.

For the developer of a Spring Data Graph backed application only the public annotations are relevant, basic knowledge of graph stores is needed to access advanced functionality like traversals. Traversal results can also be mapped to fields of entities.