IEEE Access (Jan 2024)

YARS-PG: Property Graphs Representation for Publication and Exchange

  • Lukasz Szeremeta,
  • Dominik Tomaszuk,
  • Renzo Angles

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3403924
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 12
pp. 73386 – 73399

Abstract

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Graph serialization is a critical aspect of advancing graph-oriented systems and applications. Despite the importance of standardized serialization for property graphs, there is a lack of a universal format encompassing all essential features of graph database systems. This study introduces YARS-PG, a simple, extensible, and platform-independent serialization format tailored for property graphs. YARS-PG supports all the features permitted by current property graph-based database systems and is compatible with other graph-oriented databases and tools. We delineate the design requirements of YARS-PG by detailing both functional and non-functional aspects. Besides the basic features of property graph data, YARS-PG supports schema definition, metadata, metaproperties, variables, and graph definitions. Moreover, we discuss extensions of YARS-PG, demonstrating its flexibility through canonicalization techniques. Our comparative analyses with existing formats provide valuable insights, emphasizing the unique strengths that distinguish YARS-PG in the realm of graph data interchange. This paper serves as a definitive guide to YARS-PG, unraveling its complexities and showcasing its potential as a communication protocol, a data storage format, and a messaging specification.

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