Project: From Querying to Updating: Towards DML Support for a Metadata-Aware and Annotatable Graph Database
Description
Property graph databases such as Neo4j are widely used these days for various applications like knowledge graphs backed LLM pipelines and modeling interconnected data, but traditional systems treat metadata (e.g., labels and property keys) separately from data and offer limited support for annotating subgraphs. Recent work on Meta-Property Graphs (MPGs) and MetaGPML [1] addresses this by making labels and properties first-class queryable objects and by supporting reification or annotatable subgraphs via specefic meta-node, with an initial implementation in AvantGraph focused on pattern matching, storage, and query processing engine for these features [2, 3, 4].
This project will extend that work by designing and implementing Data Manipulation Language (DML) operations for MPGs (e.g., insert, update, delete) in a metadata-aware graph database. The student will investigate suitable semantics for updates over metadata objects and reified subgraphs, implement the selected operations in AvantGraph, and evaluate correctness and performance on representative workloads. The project contributes to moving MPG support from read/query functionality toward full database usability.
References:
[1] Sepehr Sadoughi, Nikolay Yakovets, and George Fletcher. "Meta-Property Graphs: Extending Property Graphs with Metadata Awareness and Reification." arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.13813 (2024).
[2] Stijn Nooijen, Sepehr Sadoughi, and Nikolay Yakovets. "Meta-Property Graphs in Practice: Implementation and Evaluation." EDBT. 2026.
[3] https://avantgraph.io/index.html
[4] https://github.com/StijnKing/ldbc_snb_bi
Details
- Supervisor
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Nick Yakovets
- Secondary supervisor
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Sepehr Sadoughi
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