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Schema Validation and Evolution for Graph Databases

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Conceptual Modeling (ER 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11788))

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Abstract

Despite the maturity of commercial graph databases, little consensus has been reached so far on the standardization of data definition languages (DDLs) for property graphs (PG). Discussion on the characteristics of PG schemas is ongoing in many standardization and community groups. Although some basic aspects of a schema are already present in most commercial graph databases, full support is missing allowing to constraint property graphs with more or less flexibility.

In this paper, we show how schema validation can be enforced through homomorphisms between PG schemas and PG instances by leveraging a concise schema DDL inspired by Cypher syntax. We also briefly discuss PG schema evolution that relies on graph rewriting operations allowing to consider both prescriptive and descriptive schemas.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.gqlstandards.org/.

  2. 2.

    http://www.opencypher.org/.

  3. 3.

    https://s3.amazonaws.com/artifacts.opencypher.org/openCypher9.pdf.

  4. 4.

    The complete PG schema encoding of LDBC SNB is reported in [4].

  5. 5.

    https://github.com/Kappa-Dev/ReGraph.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Petra Selmer (Neo4j) for her careful proof reading and useful feedback. This work was partially funded by a grant from the Fédération Informatique de Lyon.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Lyon 1 University & CNRS Liris, Villeurbanne, France

    Angela Bonifati

  2. Neo4j, London, UK

    Peter Furniss, Alastair Green & Hannes Voigt

  3. UdL, CNRS, ENS Lyon, UCBL1, Lyon, France

    Russ Harmer & Eugenia Oshurko

Authors
  1. Angela Bonifati
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  2. Peter Furniss
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  3. Alastair Green
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  4. Russ Harmer
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  5. Eugenia Oshurko
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  6. Hannes Voigt
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Angela Bonifati .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil

    Alberto H. F. Laender

  2. Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Barbara Pernici

  3. Singapore Management University, Singapore, Singapore

    Ee-Peng Lim

  4. Univ Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil

    José Palazzo M. de Oliveira

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Bonifati, A., Furniss, P., Green, A., Harmer, R., Oshurko, E., Voigt, H. (2019). Schema Validation and Evolution for Graph Databases. In: Laender, A., Pernici, B., Lim, EP., de Oliveira, J. (eds) Conceptual Modeling. ER 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11788. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33223-5_37

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33223-5_37

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-33222-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-33223-5

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