Second International Workshop on Querying Graph Structured Data

22 March 2013, Genoa, Italy

Keynote

We are pleased to announce this year's GraphQ keynote speech:


What we talk about when we talk about graphs

George H.L. Fletcher

Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
g.h.l.fletcher@tue.nl


George H.L. Fletcher


Short Abstract

An old idea from the humanistic sciences has it that the language we use not only restricts the manner in which we view the world, but also, in a very real sense, shapes the world around us. Recently, my colleagues and I have been exploring the interesting ways in which this idea manifests itself in data management. In particular, we have been studying the expressive power of graph query languages with a focus on characterizing the ability of languages to restrict and shape concrete graph instances, purely in terms of the structure of the instances. In this talk, I will start with a brief recap of the history of such structural characterizations of query languages. I will then introduce the theoretical framework we have been developing for reasoning over graph structured data, and discuss how we put the framework to work with the design of structural indexes for (RDF) graphs, to support efficient query evaluation over massive graphs. Finally, I will conclude with a discussion of broader applications of the framework in data management and indications for further research.

Short Bio

George Fletcher is an Assistant Professor in the Databases and Hypermedia group at the Eindhoven University of Technology, in The Netherlands. George was awarded a doctorate in computer science from Indiana University, Bloomington (2007), with a dissertation on the topic of query learning for data integration. His research currently focuses on the study of database query languages for data integration and web data.