English

Semantic Foundations of Seraph Continuous Graph Query Language

Databases 2021-11-18 v1

Abstract

The scientific community has been studying graph data models for decades. Their high expressiveness and elasticity led the scientific community to design a variety of graph data models and graph query languages, and the practitioners to use them to model real-world cases and extract useful information. Recently, property graphs and, in particular, Cypher 9 (the first open version of the well-known Neo4j Inc.'s language) are gaining popularity. Practitioners find Cypher useful and applicable in many scenarios. However, we are living in a streaming world where data continuously flows. A growing number of Cypher's users show interest in continuously querying graph data to act in a timely fashion. Indeed, Cypher lacks the features for dealing with streams of (graph) data and continuous query evaluation. In this work, we propose Seraph, an extension of Cypher, as a first attempt to introduce streaming features in the context of property graph query languages. Specifically, we define Seraph semantics, we propose a first version of Seraph syntax, and we discuss the potential impacts from a user perspective.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2111.09228,
  title  = {Semantic Foundations of Seraph Continuous Graph Query Language},
  author = {Emanuele Falzone and Riccardo Tommasini and Emanuele Della Valle and Petra Selmer and Stefan Plantikow and Hannes Voigt and Keith Hare and Ljubica Lazarevic and Tobias Lindaaker},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.09228},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T07:42:23.283Z