Seeing the Trees for the Forest: Leveraging Tree-Shaped Substructures in Property Graphs

2026-03-12

AI Summary

Existing graph databases lack effective support for the tree-shaped substructures commonly found in property graphs. This work addresses this limitation by treating such tree substructures as first-class citizens and proposes a systematic management framework encompassing modeling, indexing, and query optimization. Drawing inspiration from XML structural indexing techniques, the approach enables efficient path queries within a relational graph database backend. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed method significantly improves path query performance, thereby validating the potential of structural indexing to enhance graph data management.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Graph Mining, Social Network Analysis & Community
• Machine Learning: Graph-based Machine Learning
• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search

Application Category

• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Querying, indexing, and retrieval in Web-related graphs
• Semantics and Knowledge: Scalable techniques for the creation, curation, publication, maintenance, and consumption of large, Web-based, structured, reusable, knowledge graphs and ontologies
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Bridging structured and unstructured data

Abstract

Property graphs often contain tree-shaped substructures, yet they are not captured by existing proposals for graph schemas; likewise, query languages and query engines offer little-to-no native support for managing them systematically. As a first contribution, we report on a micro experiment that demonstrates the optimization potential of treating tree-shaped substructures as first class citizens in graph database systems. In particular, we show that in systems backed by relational engines, we can achieve substantial speedups by leveraging structural indexes, as originally developed for XML databases, to accelerate path queries. Based on our findings, we put forward a vision in which tree-shaped substructures are systematically managed throughout the graph query lifecycle, from modeling and schema design to indexing and query processing, and outline arising research questions.

Problem

• property graphs
• tree-shaped substructures
• graph schemas
• query languages
• structural indexes

Innovation

• tree-shaped substructures
• structural indexing
• property graphs
• path query optimization
• graph schema