Temporal Regular Path Queries

TL;DR

This paper introduces temporal regular path queries (TRPQs) for temporal property graphs, extending graph query languages with time-aware navigation, analyzing their complexity, and demonstrating efficient evaluation through implementation and experiments.

Contribution

It proposes a formal syntax and semantics for TRPQs, studies their evaluation complexity, and provides an efficient implementation with experimental validation.

Findings

TRPQs can be evaluated in polynomial time for time-stamped TPGs.

Certain language fragments allow efficient evaluation over interval-annotated data.

Experimental results confirm practical efficiency of the implemented TRPQ fragment.

Abstract

In the last decade, substantial progress has been made towards standardizing the syntax of graph query languages, and towards understanding their semantics and complexity of evaluation. In this paper, we consider temporal property graphs (TPGs) and propose temporal regular path queries (TRPQs) that incorporate time into TPG navigation. Starting with design principles, we propose a natural syntactic extension of the MATCH clause of popular graph query languages. We then formally present the semantics of TRPQs, and study the complexity of their evaluation. We show that TRPQs can be evaluated in polynomial time if TPGs are time-stamped with time points, and identify fragments of the TRPQ language that admit efficient evaluation over a more succinct interval-annotated representation. Finally, we implement a fragment of the language in a state-of-the-art dataflow framework, and experimentally demonstrate that TRPQ can be evaluated efficiently.