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PathQuery, Google's Graph Query Language

arxiv.org

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Re: PathQuery, Google's Graph Query Language

#21

Post by Jeff_Brown »

staticassertion wrote: post #20

I feel like graph languages can be so esoteric. It would be nice to have something closer to RDF, but with filter syntax, and the ability to group filters. I've never built a language, so maybe I'm just crazy, but what's wrong with, say, https://gist.github.com/insanitybit/cd997e8d367889708edc3ec2... Basically I defined the subject in a sort of 'namespace' of constraints ("parent", "children", etc), and then the edge…

I wrote a language that's very close to natural language for writing to and querying a RSLT, a kind of higher order graph.

https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/hode/blob/master/doc...

Re: PathQuery, Google's Graph Query Language

#24

Post by ampdepolymerase »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #18

I was invited to work at Google in 2013 on an internal project using their Knowledge Graph. I had just written two books on RDF/SPARQL/linked-data and at first I was taken aback by the query language used at the time. However, when I realized how well the KG scaled and how fast the queries were, I became a fan. BTW, I think this paper is very well written. Graph queries is not an easy topic and their examples and tex…

What are your thoughts on just using plain datalog/prolog?

Re: PathQuery, Google's Graph Query Language

#25

Post by mark_l_watson »

ampdepolymerase wrote: post #24
mark_l_watson wrote: post #18

I was invited to work at Google in 2013 on an internal project using their Knowledge Graph. I had just written two books on RDF/SPARQL/linked-data and at first I was taken aback by the query language used at the time. However, when I realized how well the KG scaled and how fast the queries were, I became a fan. BTW, I think this paper is very well written. Graph queries is not an easy topic and their examples and tex…

What are your thoughts on just using plain datalog/prolog?

I have only used datalog in the form of Clojure and Datomic on a consulting job about ten years ago.

I used to be a huge Prolog fan, but I don't think that anyone has paid me to do Prolog develop in over 20 years. My largest Prolog project was porting a prototype AI planning system that I wrote in Common Lisp to ExperProlog. It took about 6 weeks to prototype the system in Common Lisp, and re-writing it in Prolog only took about two weeks.

I noticed last month that someone was offering an online Prolog course using Swi-Prolog. That might be a good place to start.

Re: PathQuery, Google's Graph Query Language

#26

Post by jeffbee »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #18

I was invited to work at Google in 2013 on an internal project using their Knowledge Graph. I had just written two books on RDF/SPARQL/linked-data and at first I was taken aback by the query language used at the time. However, when I realized how well the KG scaled and how fast the queries were, I became a fan. BTW, I think this paper is very well written. Graph queries is not an easy topic and their examples and tex…

I'm interested in industry history, so I wonder if you can comment on how much of this, if any, came into Google from Metaweb. There are no Metaweb-connected people among the authors (that I can tell) but Warren Harris is acknowledged. Was it a language that was in development before the acquisition, or was it needed mainly after?

Re: PathQuery, Google's Graph Query Language

#27

Post by criddell »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #18

I was invited to work at Google in 2013 on an internal project using their Knowledge Graph. I had just written two books on RDF/SPARQL/linked-data and at first I was taken aback by the query language used at the time. However, when I realized how well the KG scaled and how fast the queries were, I became a fan. BTW, I think this paper is very well written. Graph queries is not an easy topic and their examples and tex…

More than a decade ago I worked for a few years on a product that was based on OWL/RDF/SPARQL and since then I still see a lot of problems I'm facing in terms of subject, predicate, object triples.

The semantic web feels like a fad that has clearly passed but there are plenty of good ideas from that field that are under-utilized. For example, a lot of what gets encoded as JSON can be described with these triples and once the data is in that form, there are interesting questions you can ask of it.

Re: PathQuery, Google's Graph Query Language

#28

Post by contravariant »

slver wrote: post #15
contravariant wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because GraphQL (despite it's name) isn't made for querying graphs.

Technically it is. But in a very restricted way. Any graph, when you traverse it from a specific node, with fixed depth, and you don't explicitly work with node references, but rather node "values", looks like a tree that sprawls from that node. Anyway, PathQuery is a completely different beast regardless.

If that counts as querying a graph then SQL is also a graph language. If anything SQL is more advanced because it can query a hypergraph.

Re: PathQuery, Google's Graph Query Language

#29

Post by AtNightWeCode »

simongray wrote: post #6
MikeTaylor wrote: post #4

Strange that this paper doesn't even _mention_ GraphQL.

I don't think GraphQL is used to query graph databases directly, is it? I've always understood it to be an API protocol that was built to serve some specific needs Facebook had (e.g. bundling multiple HTTP requests), not a full-on graph query language. I should probably mention that I don't really have extensive experience using it, though.

GraphQL is basically used as SQL queries over stupid API:s. 99% of the graph DB advocates does not even understand what problem the graph DB solves. Soooo funny to argue with people when you can say that, oh, yes, we did this 20 years ago with recursive CTE:s.

Re: PathQuery, Google's Graph Query Language

#30

Post by adsharma »

I think people focus much on syntax and not enough on semantics.

After working on 2-3 iterations of similar languages (sexpressions, clojure enhanced with pipe operator), my take away is to define an API (not a new language) and support multiple languages on top of it.

I picked python and the API is here:

https://github.com/adsharma/fquery/ https://adsharma.github.io/fquery/

Like SQL, DDL and DML should be separated too.

https://adsharma.github.io/flattools-programs/

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