Skip to main content

A Recursive Approach for Defining Reachability Queries over Graph Databases

Juan Reutter, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile

Friday, January 24, 2014
11am
EBII 3211 — NCSU Centennial Campus
(Directions to Centennial campus and parking information)

This talk is part of the Taming the Data invited-speaker series, held in the Department of Computer Science at NC State University. The talk is also co-hosted by the NCSU CSC Systems Research Seminar.

Talk Title: A Recursive Approach for Defining Reachability Queries over Graph Databases

Talk abstract:

The need for managing and querying graph structured data is nowadays essential for a variety of application domains that have adopted graph models for storing their data, and includes social networks, biological databases, geographical models and the Semantic Web. This adoption has brought several challenges for the database community, demanding new querying techniques for which typical relational database tools are not sufficient, or not easy to adapt.

One example of these challenges is reachability, or connectivity, queries. These queries look for connections between different elements of a graph or a network, that involve complex paths via some intermediaries. Most of the research in the literature has focused on those queries in which paths are specified by means of regular expressions, denoted as regular path queries, to the point where these are now being addressed by several graph database systems. However, this approach has several limitations. In particular, the implementation of these queries requires techniques that are not standard for database practitioners, and it is not easy to couple these queries with existing systems based on relational databases.

In this talk I describe the recursive triple algebra, a different approach for computing connectivity queries that relies more on a procedural approach, based on an algebra engineered to query graphs.

About the speaker:

Juan Reutter is an assistant professor at the Computer Science Department at Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. He received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in May, 2013. His research interests are in data management and automata theory. He was the recipient of the Ramón Salas Award for the best chilean work in engineering and won a best paper award in ACM-PODS conference on 2011. He has published several papers in major database conference and journals, and has been invited two times to publish in JACM.

This invited-speaker series has been made possible thanks to generous support from:

Please send your comments to Rada Chirkova