Title: Context-Free Path Querying by Matrix Multiplication,
Abstract: Graph data models are widely used in many areas, for example, bioinformatics,
graph databases. In these areas, it is often required to process queries for
large graphs. Some of the most common graph queries are navigational queries.
The result of query evaluation is a set of implicit relations between nodes of
the graph, i.e. paths in the graph. A natural way to specify these relations is
by specifying paths using formal grammars over the alphabet of edge labels. An
answer to a context-free path query in this approach is usually a set of
triples (A, m, n) such that there is a path from the node m to the node n,
whose labeling is derived from a non-terminal A of the given context-free
grammar. This type of queries is evaluated using the relational query
semantics. Another example of path query semantics is the single-path query
semantics which requires presenting a single path from the node m to the node
n, whose labeling is derived from a non-terminal A for all triples (A, m, n)
evaluated using the relational query semantics. There is a number of algorithms
for query evaluation which use these semantics but all of them perform poorly
on large graphs. One of the most common technique for efficient big data
processing is the use of a graphics processing unit (GPU) to perform
computations, but these algorithms do not allow to use this technique
efficiently. In this paper, we show how the context-free path query evaluation
using these query semantics can be reduced to the calculation of the matrix
transitive closure. Also, we propose an algorithm for context-free path query
evaluation which uses relational query semantics and is based on matrix
operations that make it possible to speed up computations by using a GPU.