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Adding regular expressions to graph reachability and pattern queries

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Abstract

It is increasingly common to find graphs in which edges are of different types, indicating a variety of relationships. For such graphs we propose a class of reachability queries and a class of graph patterns, in which an edge is specified with a regular expression of a certain form, expressing the connectivity of a data graph via edges of various types. In addition, we define graph pattern matching based on a revised notion of graph simulation. On graphs in emerging applications such as social networks, we show that these queries are capable of finding more sensible information than their traditional counterparts. Better still, their increased expressive power does not come with extra complexity. Indeed, (1) we investigate their containment and minimization problems, and show that these fundamental problems are in quadratic time for reachability queries and are in cubic time for pattern queries. (2) We develop an algorithm for answering reachability queries, in quadratic time as for their traditional counterpart. (3) We provide two cubic-time algorithms for evaluating graph pattern queries, as opposed to the NP-completeness of graph pattern matching via subgraph isomorphism. (4) The effectiveness and efficiency of these algorithms are experimentally verified using real-life data and synthetic data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH8 9YL, UK

    Wenfei Fan & Yinghui Wu

  2. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, 150001, China

    Wenfei Fan & Jianzhong Li

  3. NLSDE Lab, Beihang University, Beijing, 100919, China

    Shuai Ma

  4. Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar Foundation, Doha, Qatar

    Nan Tang

Authors
  1. Wenfei Fan
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  2. Jianzhong Li
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  3. Shuai Ma
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  4. Nan Tang
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  5. Yinghui Wu
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Correspondence to Shuai Ma.

Additional information

Wenfei Fan is professor (Chair) of Web Data Management in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, UK. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, UK, a national professor of the Thousand-talent Program and a Yangtze River Scholar, China. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, and his MS and BS from Peking University. He has received the Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-time Award of ACM PODS 2010, the best paper award for VLDB 2010, the Roger Needham Award in 2008 (UK), the best paper award for ICDE 2007, the best paper of the Year Award for Computer Networks in 2002, and the Career Award in 2001 (USA). His current research interests include database theory and systems, in particular, data quality, data integration, distributed query processing, query languages, recommender systems, social networks, and web services.

Jianzhong Li is a professor and the chairman of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Harbin Institute of Technology, China. He worked in the University of California at Berkeley as a visiting scholar in 1985. From 1986 to 1987 and from 1992 to 1993, he was a scientist in the Information Research Group in the Department of Computer Science at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA. He was also a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, from 1991 to 1992 and from 1998 to 1999. His current research interests include database management systems, data warehousing, data mining, and wireless sensor networks. He has authored three books and published more than 200 papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings, such as VLDB Journal, Algorithmic, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Parallel and Distributed Database, SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, INFOCOM, and ICDCS. He has been involved in the program committees of major computer science and technology conferences, including SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, INFOCOM, ICDCS, and www. He has also served on the editorial boards for distinguished journals, including Knowledge and Data Engineering, and refereed papers for varied journals and proceedings.

Shuai Ma is a professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University. He obtained his two PhD degrees from University of Edinburgh in 2010, and from Peking University in 2004. He was a postdoctoral research fellow in the database group, University of Edinburgh, and a consultant at Bell labs, Murray Hill, USA in the summer of 2008. His research interests include database theory and systems, data cleaning, graph matching, social data analysis, and data intensive computing. He has published a number of papers on data quality and graph pattern matching in top database conferences/journals, such as SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, www, and the VLDB Journal. He is a recipient of the best paper award for VLDB 2010, and the Visiting Young Faculty Program of MRSA in 2012.

Nan Tang received his PhD from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2007. Currently, he is a research scientist at QCRI (Qatar Computing Research Institute), Qatar Foundation, Qatar. He worked as a research staff member at CWI, Netherlands, from 2008 to 2010. He has been a research fellow at University of Edinburgh since 2010. His current research interests include data quality and graph database management.

Yinghui Wu is currently a research scientist of the Department of Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Yinghui received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh, UK in 2010, supervised by Prof.Wenfei Fan. His research interests lie in the areas of database theory and graph database management, with emphasis on graph database models and query languages. He has published papers in SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, and ICDT.

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Fan, W., Li, J., Ma, S. et al. Adding regular expressions to graph reachability and pattern queries. Front. Comput. Sci. 6, 313–338 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-012-1312-y

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