Grid-Aware Evaluation of Regular Path Queries on Spatial Networks

Abstract

Regular path queries (RPQs), expressed as regular expressions over the alphabet of database edge-labels, are commonly used for guided navigation of graph databases. While convenient to use, RPQs are notorious for their high computational demand. In this paper, we present a grid- aware, fault tolerant distributed algorithm for answering RPQs on spatial networks. We engineer each part of the algorithm to account for the assumed computational-grid setting. We experimentally evaluate our algorithm, and show that for typical user queries, our algorithm satisfies the desiderata for distributed computing in general, and computational-grids in particular.