Outstanding IMFD participation in the International Semantic Web Conference ISWC 2024 - Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data

November, 2024. The International Semantic Web Conference is the most important conference on the semantic web at a global level: it is the place where the main advances in the area of the Semantic Web are presented. The alternate director of the IMFD and director of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chile, Aidan Hogan, was the General Chair of this version of the conference, which was held in Baltimore, USA.

The area of the semantic web seeks to create technologies for publishing data that are readable by computer applications, with the goal of improving the internet by extending interoperability between systems using intelligent agents: programs in computers that search for information without human operators.

ISWC brings together researchers, professionals and industry specialists, seeking to promote the debate, advancement and creation of the future of semantic web technologies. The Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data has a line of research in which it works to develop techniques to carry out efficient and correct implementations of query languages, among which this proposal is framed.

Outstanding participation in IMFD research

"At ISWC 2024, IMFD presented a framework for solving a number of query language functionalities for graphs, which were developed on top of the latest ISO standard on these languages," comments Domagoj Vrgoč, IMFD researcher and IMC-UC academic. "Prior to this work, there was no previous proposal on how to do this, as all previous alternatives were partial. The IMFD proposal is the only universal one, and in terms of performance, it is far superior to current solutions," he stresses. At the conference, Domagoj Vrgoč was recognized as "Best Research Track Senior PC Member", for his work in managing the peer review process.

The paper presented by IMFD researchers, "PathFinder: Returning Paths in Graph Queries", by Benjamin Farias (Catholic University, IMFD), Wim Martens (University of Bayreuth), Carlos Rojas (IMFD) and Domagoj Vrgoč (Catholic University, IMFD), received the award for "Best Student Paper, research track", and also featured a demonstration: "PathFinder Demo: Returning Paths in Graph Queries", by Vicente Calisto (IMFD), Benjamin Farias (Catholic University, IMFD), Win Martens (University of Bayreuth), Carlos Rojas (IMFD), Domagoj Vrgoc (Catholic University, IMFD).

In this paper, the researchers present a framework on path queries, which are "the class of queries used in all standard query languages, such as SPARQL, Cypher, SQL/PGQ and GQL. It is worth noting that path queries are a differentiating class for graph database technology, as they cannot be solved with classical database techniques and therefore present a challenge in terms of evaluation and efficiency," according to Domagoj Vrgoc.

While SPARQL in path queries, returns endpoints, in Cypher, SQL/PGQ and GQL full paths are achieved. In this paper, the proposal presents the first first framework to match endpoint and full path results in all fifteen modes of SQL/PGQ and GQL standards.

In Millenium DB, the data manager developed at IMFD that allows handling knowledge graphs with large volumes of information, the researchers prepared a complete implementation of this proposal, which can be tested at: https://mdb.imfd.cl/path_finder.

IMFD researcher and U. Chile academic, Sebastián Ferrada, participated in the organizing committee Web and Publicity Chair, was highlighted as one of the "Outstanding PC members", and will participate as Proceedings & Metadata Chair of the 2025 conference, to be held in Nara, Japan. In addition, the poster Extracting Graphs from Tables via Conceptual Models, in which he presents initial progress on a mapping to convert relational databases to graph databases, using the conceptual model of the database as a means to capture its underlying semantics.