Querying graph patterns

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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