Distributed Grouping of Property Graphs with GRADOOP

Abstract

Property graphs are an intuitive way to model, analyze and visualize complex relationships among heterogeneous data objects, for example, as they occur in social, biological and information networks. These graphs typically contain thousands or millions of vertices and edges and their entire representation can easily overwhelm an analyst. One way to reduce complexity is the grouping of vertices and edges to summary graphs. In this paper, we present an algorithm for graph grouping with support for attribute aggregation and structural summarization by user-defined vertex and edge properties. The algorithm is part of G , an open-source system for graph analytics. G is implemented on top of Apache Flink, a state-of-the-art distributed dataflow framework, and thus allows us to scale graph analytical programs across multiple machines. Our evaluation demonstrates the scalability of the algorithm on real-world and synthetic social network data.