G-path: flexible path pattern query on large graphs

With the socialization trend of web sites and applications, the techniques of effective management of graph-structured data have become one of the most important modern web technologies. In this paper, we present a system of path query on large graphs, known as G-Path. Based on Hadoop distributed framework and bulk synchronized parallel model, the system can process generic queries without preprocessing or building indices. To demonstrate the system, we developed a web-based application which allows searching entities and relationships on a large social network, e.g., DBLP publication network or Twitter dataset. With the flexibility of G-Path, the application is able to handle different kinds of queries. For example, a user may want to search for a publication graph of an author while another user may want to search for all publications of the author's co-authors. All these queries can be done by an interactive user interface and the results will be shown in a visual graph.