An Overview of Graph Indexing and Querying Techniques

Recently, there has been a lot of interest in the application of graphs in different domains. Graphs have been widely used for data modeling in different application domains such as: chemical compounds, protein networks, social networks and Semantic Web. Given a query graph, the task of retrieving related graphs as a result of the query from a large graph database is a key issue in any graph-based application. This has raised a crucial need for efficient graph indexing and querying techniques. In this chapter, we provide an overview of different techniques for indexing and querying graph databases. An overview of several proposals of graph query language is also given. Finally, we provide a set of guidelines for future research directions.