Interactive Querying over Large Network Data: Scalability, Visualization, and Interaction Design

Given the explosive growth of modern graph data, new methods are needed that allow for the querying of complex graph structures without the need of a complicated querying languages; in short, interactive graph querying is desirable. We describe our work towards achieving our overall research goal of designing and developing an interactive querying system for large network data. We focus on three critical aspects: scalable data mining algorithms, graph visualization, and interaction design. We have already completed an approximate subgraph matching system called MAGE in our previous work that fulfills the algorithmic foundation allowing us to query a graph with hundreds of millions of edges. Our preliminary work on visual graph querying, Graphite, was the first step in the process to making an interactive graph querying system. We are in the process of designing the graph visualization and robust interaction needed to make truly interactive graph querying a reality.