GeoSPARQL 1.1: An Almost Decadal Update to the Most Important Geospatial LOD Standard

In 2012 the Open Geospatial Consortium published GeoSPARQL defining “an RDF/OWL ontology for [spatial] information”, “SPARQL extension functions” for performing spatial operations on RDF data and “RIF rules” defining entailments to be drawn from graph pattern matching. In the 8+ years since its publication, GeoSPARQL has become the most important spatial Semantic Web standard, as judged by references to it in other Semantic Web standards and its wide use for Semantic Web data. An update to GeoSPARQL was proposed in 2019 to deliver a version 1.1 with a charter to: handle outstanding change requests and source new ones from the user community and to “better present” the standard, that is to better link all the standard’s parts and better document & exemplify elements. Expected updates included new geometry representations, alignments to other ontologies, handling of new spatial referencing systems, and new artifact presentation. In this paper, we describe motivating change requests and actual resultant updates in the candidate version 1.1 of the standard alongside reference implementations and usage examples. We also describe the theory behind particular updates, initial implementations of many parts of the standard, and our expectations for GeoSPARQL 1.1’s use.

Bounded Graph Pattern Matching With View

Bounded evaluation using views is to compute the answers $Q({\cal D})$ to a query $Q$ in a dataset ${\cal D}$ by accessing only cached views and a small fraction $D_Q$ of ${\cal D}$ such that the size $|D_Q|$ of $D_Q$ and the time to identify $D_Q$ are independent of $|{\cal D}|$, no matter how big ${\cal D}$ is. Though proven effective for relational data, it has yet been investigated for graph data. In light of this, we study the problem of bounded pattern matching using views. We first introduce access schema ${\cal C}$ for graphs and propose a notion of joint containment to characterize bounded pattern matching using views. We show that a pattern query $\sq$ can be boundedly evaluated using views ${\cal V}(G)$ and a fraction $G_Q$ of $G$ if and only if the query $\sq$ is jointly contained by ${\cal V}$ and ${\cal C}$. Based on the characterization, we develop an efficient algorithm as well as an optimization strategy to compute matches by using ${\cal V}(G)$ and $G_Q$. Using real-life and synthetic data, we experimentally verify the performance of these algorithms, and show that (a) our algorithm for joint containment determination is not only effective but also efficient; and (b) our matching algorithm significantly outperforms its counterpart, and the optimization technique can further improve performance by eliminating unnecessary input.

Continuous matching of evolving patterns over dynamic graph data

Nowadays, the scale of various graphs soars rapidly, which imposes a serious challenge to develop processing and analytic algorithms. Among them, graph pattern matching is the one of the most primitive tasks that find a wide spectrum of applications, the performance of which is yet often affected by the size and dynamicity of graphs. In order to handle large dynamic graphs, incremental pattern matching is proposed to avoid re-computing matches of patterns over the entire data graph, hence reducing the matching time and improving the overall execution performance. Due to the complexity of the problem, little work has been reported so far to solve the problem, and most of them only solve the graph pattern matching problem under the scenario of the data graph varying alone. In this article, we are devoted to a more complicated but very practical graph pattern matching problem, continuous matching of evolving patterns over dynamic graph data, and the investigation presents a novel algorithm for continuously pattern matching along with changes of both pattern graph and data graph. Specifically, we propose a concise representation of partial matching solutions, which can help to avoid re-computing matches of the pattern and speed up subsequent matching process. In order to enable the updates of data graph and pattern graph, we propose an incremental maintenance strategy, to efficiently maintain the intermediate results. Moreover, we conceive an effective model for estimating step-wise cost of pattern evaluation to drive the matching process. Extensive experiments verify the superiority of .

A Survey on Distributed Graph Pattern Matching in Massive Graphs

Besides its NP-completeness, the strict constraints of subgraph isomorphism are making it impractical for graph pattern matching (GPM) in the context of big data. As a result, relaxed GPM models have emerged as they yield interesting results in a polynomial time. However, massive graphs generated by mostly social networks require a distributed storing and processing of the data over multiple machines, thus, requiring GPM to be revised by adopting new paradigms of big graphs processing, e.g., Think-Like-A-Vertex and its derivatives. This article discusses and proposes a classification of distributed GPM approaches with a narrow focus on the relaxed models.

A Backtracking Algorithmic Toolbox for Solving the Subgraph Isomorphism Problem

The subgraph isomorphism problem asks whether a given graph is a subgraph of another graph. It is one of the most general NP-complete problems since many other problems (e.g., Hamiltonian cycle, clique, independent set, etc.) have a natural reduction to subgraph isomorphism. Furthermore, there is a variety of practical applications where graph pattern matching is the core problem. Developing efficient algorithms and solvers for this problem thus enables good solutions to a variety of different practical problems. In this chapter, the authors present and experimentally explore various algorithmic refinements and code optimizations for improving the performance of subgraph isomorphism solvers. In particular, they focus on algorithms that are based on the backtracking approach and constraint satisfaction programming. They gather experiences from many state-of-the-art algorithms as well as from their engagement in this field. Lessons learned from engineering such a solver can be utilized in many other fields where backtracking is a prominent approach for solving a particular problem.