Explaining Results of Path Queries on Graphs

Many graph query languages use, at their core, path queries that yield node pairs that are connected by a path of interest. For the end-user, such node pairs only give limited insight as to why this query result is obtained, as the pair does not directly identify the underlying path of interest. To address this limitation of path queries, we propose the single-path semantics, which evaluates path queries to, for each node pair (m, n), a single path from m to n satisfying the conditions of the query. To put our proposal in practice, we provide an efficient algorithm for evaluating context-free path queries, a particular powerful type of path queries, using the single-path semantics. Additionally, we perform a short evaluation of our techniques that shows that the single-path semantics is practically feasible, even when query results grow large.