International audience

Property Graphs are a versatile and expressive data model that has gained widespread adoption due to their flexibility in supporting labeled and attributed nodes and edges. They are well-established in research communities and are becoming widespread in companies and organizations across various sectors. They have been boosted by a fervent ISO/IEC standardization activity, leading to dedicated query and schema languages. While the current standards are still evolving, opportunities remain to enrich them with features such as composability. The plethora of existing query languages reflects a rich and diverse ecosystem, which ongoing unification efforts aim to align. This tutorial aims to deepen the understanding of Property Graph standards by showcasing their strengths, highlighting recent unification efforts, clarifying the central role of schema constraints, and exploring the rich landscape of research and industrial opportunities shaping the future of graph data management.

Analytical queries over RDF data are becoming prominent as a result of the proliferation of knowledge graphs. Yet, RDF databases are not optimized to perform such queries efficiently, leading to long processing times. A well known technique to improve the performance of analytical queries is to exploit materialized views.Although popular in relational databases, view materialization for RDF and SPARQL has not yet transitioned into practice, due to the non-trivial application to the RDF graph model. Motivated by a lack of understanding of the impact of view materialization alternatives for RDF data, we demonstrate Sofos, a system that implements and compares several cost models for view materialization. Sofos is, to the best of our knowledge, the first attempt to adapt cost models, initially studied in relational data, to the generic RDF setting, and to propose new ones, analyzing their pitfalls and merits. Sofos takes an RDF dataset and an analytical query for some facet in the data, and compares and evaluates alternative cost models, displaying statistics and insights about time, memory consumption, and query characteristics.

The rapid explosion of linked data has resulted into many weakly structured and incomplete data sources, where typing information might be missing. On the other hand, type information is essential for a number of tasks such as query answering, integration, summarization and partitioning. Existing approaches for type discovery, either completely ignore type declarations available in the dataset (implicit type discovery approaches), or rely only on existing types, in order to complement them (explicit type enrichment approaches). Implicit type discovery approaches are based on instance grouping, which requires an exhaustive comparison between the instances. This process is expensive and not incremental. Explicit type enrichment approaches on the other hand, are not able to identify new types and they can not process data sources that have little or no schema information. In this paper, we present HInT, the first incremental and hybrid type discovery system for RDF datasets, enabling type discovery in datasets where type declarations are missing. To achieve this goal, we incrementally identify the patterns of the various instances, we index and then group them to identify the types. During the processing of an instance, our approach exploits its type information, if available, to improve the quality of the discovered types by guiding the classification of the new instance in the correct group and by refining the groups already built. We analytically and experimentally show that our approach dominates in terms of efficiency, competitors from both worlds, implicit type discovery and explicit type enrichment while outperforming them in most of the cases in terms of quality.

Semantic summaries try to extract compact information from the original RDF graph, while reducing its size. State of the art structural semantic summaries, focus primarily on the graph structure of the data, trying to maximize the summary’s utility for a specific purpose, such as indexing, query answering and source selection. In this paper, we present an approach that is able to construct high quality summaries, exploiting a small part of the query workload, maximizing their utility for query answering, i.e. the query coverage. We demonstrate our approach using two real world datasets and the corresponding query workloads and we show that we strictly dominates current state of the art in terms of query coverage.

As knowledge bases are constantly evolving, there is a clear need for monitoring and analyzing the changes that occur on them. Traditional approaches for studying the evolution of data focus on providing humans with deltas that include loads of information. In this work, we envision a processing model that recommends evolution measures taking into account particular challenges, such as relatedness, transparency, diversity, fairness and anonymity. We target at supporting humans with complementary measures that offer high-level overviews of the changes to help them understand how data of interest evolves.