Ontology-based subgraph querying

Abstract

Subgraph querying has been applied in a variety of emerging applications. Traditional subgraph querying based on subgraph isomorphism requires identical label matching, which is often too restrictive to capture the matches that are semantically close to the query graphs. This paper extends subgraph querying to identify semantically related matches by leveraging ontology information. (1) We introduce the ontology-based subgraph querying, which revises subgraph isomorphism by mapping a query to semantically related subgraphs in terms of a given ontology graph. We introduce a metric to measure the similarity of the matches. Based on the metric, we introduce an optimization problem to find top K best matches. (2) We provide a filtering-and-verification framework to identify (top-K) matches for ontology-based subgraph queries. The framework efficiently extracts a small subgraph of the data graph from an ontology index, and further computes the matches by only accessing the extracted subgraph. (3) In addition, we show that the ontology index can be efficiently updated upon the changes to the data graphs, enabling the framework to cope with dynamic data graphs. (4) We experimentally verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our framework using both synthetic and real life graphs, comparing with traditional subgraph querying methods.