Duen Horng (Polo) Chau Christos Faloutsos, Hanghang Tong, Jason Hong, Brian Gallagher, and Tina Eliassi-Rad

IEEE International Conference on Data Mining

January 2008

We presentGraphite, a system that allows the user to visually construct a query pattern, finds both its exact and approximate matching subgraphs in large attributed graphs, and visualizes the matches. For ex-ample, in a social network where a person’s occupation is an attribute, the user can draw a ‘star’ query for “finding a CEO who has interacted with a Secre-tary, a Manager, and an Accountant, or a structure very similar to this”. Graphiteuses the G-Rayal-gorithm to run the query against a user-chosen data graph, gaining all of its benefits, namely its high speed, scalability, and its ability to find both exact and near matches. Therefore, for the example above, Graphite tolerates indirect paths between, say, the CEO and the Accountant, when no direct path exists. Graphite uses fast algorithms to estimate node proximities when finding matches, enabling it to scale well with the graph database size. We demonstrate Graphite’s usage and ben-efits using the DBLP author-publication graph, which consists of 356K nodes and 1.9M edges. A demo video of Graphitecan be downloaded at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dchau/graphite/graphite.mov.