Starting in Trinity College Dublin,[5] the development team behind TerminusDB ran the Horizon 2020 project ALIGNED that worked from February 2015 to January 2018.

An open-access e-book entitled Engineering Agile Big-Data Systems was published on completion of the ALIGNED project.

[19] TerminusDB uses a CowDuck mascot - the motif finds its origins in the examples used by core engineer Matthijs van Otterdijk when first demonstrating the append only immutable data store[20] TerminusDB is an in-memory graph database management system with a rich query language.

The names for nodes and labels are drawn from a set of IRIs (Internationalized Resource Identifiers).

TerminusDB has a promise based client for the browser and node.js it is available through the npm registry, or can be directly included in web-sites.

[23] GraphQL is implemented to allow users to query TerminusDB projects in such a way that deep linking can be discovered.

It allows TerminusDB to treat the database as a document store or a graph interchangeably, and provides query features to make relationship traversals easy.