Meta-Property Graphs: Extending Property Graphs with Metadata Awareness and Reification

TL;DR

Meta-Property Graphs extend the ISO standard Property Graph model by adding native support for metadata querying and reification, enabling advanced analytics and governance capabilities.

Contribution

We introduce Meta-Property Graphs, a backwards compatible extension that incorporates metadata awareness and reification into property graphs, along with the MetaGPML query language.

Findings

Enables querying of labels and properties as first-class objects

Supports reification of substructures within graphs

Facilitates advanced data analytics and governance tasks

Abstract

The ISO standard Property Graph model has become increasingly popular for representing complex, interconnected data. However, it lacks native support for querying metadata and reification, which limits its abilities to deal with the demands of modern applications. We introduce the vision of Meta-Property Graphs, a backwards compatible extension of the property graph model addressing these limitations. Our approach enables first-class treatment of labels and properties as queryable objects and supports reification of substructures in a graph. We propose MetaGPML, a backwards compatible extension of the Graph Pattern Matching Language forming the core of the ISO standard GQL, to query these enhanced graphs. We demonstrate how these foundations pave the way for advanced data analytics and governance tasks that are challenging or impossible with current property graph systems.