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Span-reachability querying in large temporal graphs

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Abstract

Reachability is a fundamental problem in graph analysis. In applications such as social networks and collaboration networks, edges are always associated with timestamps. Most existing works on reachability queries in temporal graphs assume that two vertices are related if they are connected by a path with non-decreasing timestamps (time-respecting) of edges. This assumption fails to capture the relationship between entities involved in the same group or activity with no time-respecting path connecting them. In this paper, we define a new reachability model, called span-reachability, designed to relax the time order dependency and identify the relationship between entities in a given time period. We adopt the idea of two-hop cover and propose an index-based method to answer span-reachability queries. Several optimizations are also given to improve the efficiency of index construction and query processing. We conduct extensive experiments on eighteen real-world datasets to show the efficiency of our proposed solution.

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Notes

  1. http://snap.stanford.edu/data/index.html.

  2. http://konect.cc/.

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Acknowledgements

Ying Zhang is supported by ARC FT170100128 and ARC DP210101393. Lu Qin is supported by ARC FT200100787 and DP210101347. Dawei Cheng is supported by the National Science Foundation of China under grant no 62102287. Wenjie Zhang is supported by ARC DP180103096 and ARC DP200101116.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of New South Wales, Kensington, Australia

    Dong Wen & Wenjie Zhang

  2. AAII, University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, Australia

    Bohua Yang, Ying Zhang & Lu Qin

  3. Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tongji University, Shanghai, China

    Dawei Cheng

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  1. Dong Wen
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  2. Bohua Yang
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  3. Ying Zhang
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  4. Lu Qin
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Correspondence to Dawei Cheng.

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Wen, D., Yang, B., Zhang, Y. et al. Span-reachability querying in large temporal graphs. The VLDB Journal 31, 629–647 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00778-021-00715-z

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