Generalized Graph Pattern Matching

Graphs are high expressive models and especially suitable for modelling highly complex structures, the number of applications that use them for modelling both their data and the processes that manipulate has grown dramatically in recent years. The use of new conceptual structures in real-world applications requires the development of new systems to store and query such structures in order to allow users to access data effectively and efficiently. As with all new technologies, it is still in the development phase and in search of a set of standards ensuring a continued growth. The growing popularity of Graph Databases has led to the emergence of interesting problems related to storage and query in these systems. These databases have robust fundamentals in terms of basic information management (creation, access, deletion, and modification of individual elements of the structure), but they lack standards in some other tasks necessary for the storage and retrieval of information, like those related to more advanced query mechanisms. Among the problems related to these query processes, the detection of patterns is considered as one of the fundamental ones since it includes other subproblems necessary to obtain powerful query systems, such as the search of subgraphs or minimum paths, or the study of connectivity [18, 10]. In this paper we present Generalized Graph Query (GGQ), a proposal to carry out queries in property graphs. GGQ represents a robust logical framework, making it especially useful in graph discovery procedures and generalizing other more basic tools that have been proved very useful on related tasks. In addition, we will present a collection of operations that allow to obtain complex GGQs from simpler ones, something very useful when automating the construction of complex queries.