When graph database users explore unfamiliar graphs, potentially with heterogeneous structure, users may need to find how two or more groups of nodes are connected in a graph, even when users are not able to describe the connections. This is only partially supported by existing query languages, which allow searching for paths, but not for trees connecting three or more node groups.In this work, we formally show how to integrate connecting tree patterns (CTPs, in short) with a graph query language such as GPML [1], SPARQL or Cypher, leading to Extended Queries (or EQs, in short). We then study a set of algorithms for evaluating CTPs; we generalize prior keyword search work to be complete, most importantly by (i) considering bidirectional edge traversal, (ii) allowing users to select any score function for ranking CTP results and (iii) returning all results. To cope with very large search spaces, we propose efficient pruning techniques and formally establish a large set of cases where our best algorithm, MOLESP, is complete even with pruning. Our experiments validate the performance of our algorithms on many synthetic and real-world workloads.

Graph databases are enjoying enormous popularity, through both their RDF and Property Graphs (PG) incarnations, in a variety of applications. To query graphs, query languages provide structured, as well as unstructured primitives. While structured queries allow expressing precise information needs, they are unsuited for exploring unfamiliar datasets, as they require prior knowledge of the schema and structure of the dataset. Prior research on keyword search in graph databases do not suffer from this limitation. However, keyword queries do not allow expressing precise search criteria when users do know some. This tutorial (1.5 hours) builds a continuum between structured graph querying through languages such as SPARQL and GPML, a recently proposed standard for PG querying, on one hand, and graph keyword search, on the other hand. In this space between querying and information retrieval, we analyze the features of modern query languages that go toward unstructured search, discuss their strength, limitations, and compare their computational complexity. In particular, we focus on ( i ) lessons learned from the rich literature of graph keyword search, in particular with respect to result scoring; ( ii ) language mechanisms for integrating both complex structured querying and powerful methods to search for connections users do not know in advance. We conclude by discussing the open challenges and future work directions.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are used to store heterogenous information in the form of graphs. One flexible and non-expert way to query these KGs is to use relationship queries or keyword search. The user can specify a query using keywords referring to entities in the graph. The system then returns a set of relationships among the queried entities. However, effectively querying these graphs is still challenging for a new user. She is not familiar with the entities and relationships in the graph and hence, her queries could often return empty or too few answers. We demonstrate a system called Insta-Search which facilitates effective exploration of KGs using relationship queries. Insta-Search helps the user by giving autocomplete keyword suggestions for partially typed words. It also displays an estimated number of answers that the current query would fetch along with few approximate top-scoring answers. The users also get entity suggestions so that they can iteratively reformulate the query until they find the query with the expected results. On submitting the query, the system returns ranked query results, grouped on the basis of similar information content to enhance result interpretation. No prerequisite knowledge of the data is required by the user to be able to use the system.

Organisations store huge amounts of data from multiple heterogeneous sources in the form of Knowledge Graphs (KGs). One of the ways to query these KGs is to use SPARQL queries over a database engine. Since SPARQL follows exact match semantics, the queries may return too few or no results. Recent works have proposed query relaxation where the query engine judiciously replaces a query predicate with similar predicates using weighted relaxation rules mined from the KG. The space of possible relaxations is potentially too large to fully explore and users are typically interested in only top-k results, so such query engines use top-k algorithms for query processing. However, they may still process all the relaxations, many of whose answers do not contribute towards top-k answers. This leads to computation overheads and delayed response times. We propose Spec-QP, a query planning framework that speculatively determines which relaxations will have their results in the top-k answers. Only these relaxations are processed using the top-k operators. We, therefore, reduce the computation overheads and achieve faster response times without adversely affecting the quality of results. We tested Spec-QP over two datasets - XKG and Twitter, to demonstrate the efficiency of our planning framework at reducing runtimes with reasonable accuracy for query engines supporting relaxations.