Graphs-at-a-Time: Query Language and Access Methods for Graph Databases

Graphs have become popular for modeling structured data. As a result, graph queries are becoming common and graph indexing has come to play an essential role in query processing. The authors introduce the concept of a graph closure, a generalized graph that represents a number of graphs. The indexing technique, called Closure-tree, organizes graphs hierarchically where each node summarizes its descendants by a graph closure. Closure-tree can efficiently support both subgraph queries and similarity queries. Subgraph queries find graphs that contain a specific subgraph, whereas similarity queries find graphs that are similar to a query graph.