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Querying graph patterns

Published:13 June 2011Publication History

ABSTRACT

Graph data appears in a variety of application domains, and many uses of it, such as querying, matching, and transforming data, naturally result in incompletely specified graph data, i.e., graph patterns. While queries need to be posed against such data, techniques for querying patterns are generally lacking, and properties of such queries are not well understood.

Our goal is to study the basics of querying graph patterns. We first identify key features of patterns, such as node and label variables and edges specified by regular expressions, and define a classification of patterns based on them. We then study standard graph queries on graph patterns, and give precise characterizations of both data and combined complexity for each class of patterns. If complexity is high, we do further analysis of features that lead to intractability, as well as lower complexity restrictions. We introduce a new automata model for query answering with two modes of acceptance: one captures queries returning nodes, and the other queries returning paths. We study properties of such automata, and the key computational tasks associated with them. Finally, we provide additional restrictions for tractability, and show that some intractable cases can be naturally cast as instances of constraint satisfaction problem.

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      • Published in

        cover image ACM Conferences
        PODS '11: Proceedings of the thirtieth ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systems
        June 2011
        332 pages
        ISBN:9781450306607
        DOI:10.1145/1989284

        Copyright © 2011 ACM

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 13 June 2011

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