A graph grammars based framework for querying graph-like data

The widespread use of graph-based models for representing data collections (e.g. object-oriented data, XML data, etc.) has stimulated the database research community to investigate the problem of defining declarative languages for querying graph-like databases. In this paper, a new framework for querying graph-like data based on graph grammars is proposed. The new paradigm allows us to verify structural properties of graphs and to extract sub-graphs. More specifically, a new form of query (namely graph query) is proposed, consisting in a particular graph grammar which defines a class of graphs to be matched on the graph representing the database. Thus, differently from path queries, the answer of a graph query is not just a set of nodes, but a subgraph, extracted from the input graph, which satisfies the structural properties defined by the graph grammar. Expressiveness and complexity of different forms of graph queries are discussed, and some practical applications are shown.