A succinct data structure for self-indexing ternary relations

In this paper we present a new compressed and self-indexed data structure that we call Interleaved K2-tree (IK2-tree), designed to compactly represent and efficiently query general ternary relations. The IK2-tree is an evolution of an existing data structure, the K2-tree [6], initially designed to represent Web graphs and later applied to other domains. The IK2-tree is able to extend the K2-tree to represent a ternary relation, based on the idea of decomposing it into a collection of binary relations but providing indexing capabilities in all the three dimensions. We present different ways to use IK2-tree to model different types of ternary relations using as reference two typical domains: RDF and Temporal Graphs. We also experimentally evaluate our representations comparing them in space usage and performance with other solutions of the state of the art.