Domagoj Vrgoč receives the Test of Time Award at the ICDT

March, 2023.- "Querying Graph Databases with XPath" is the title of the work by Domagoj Vrgoč, an academic at the Institute of Mathematical and Computational Engineering (IMC) and IMFD researcher. It is one of the papers honored with the "Test of Time" award during the International Conference on Extending Database Technology (ICDT), the world's most important event in the field of databases, whose 2023 edition is being held this week in Ioannina, Greece.

The "Test of Time" award was established in 2013 by the ICDT organizers to recognize research presented during the decade prior to each edition of the conference that, as its name suggests, has stood the test of time. At the 26th edition, which runs until Friday, March 31, it was decided to recognize two papers that have had the highest impact in terms of research, methodology, conceptual contribution, or transfer to the practical field over the last ten years: one of them is precisely the study conducted by Vrgoč together with Leonid Libkin (University of Edinburgh, Scotland) and Wim Martens (University of Bayreuth, Germany).

According to the organizers, the paper presented at the 2013 ICDT has had a "profound impact on the design and standardization of modern graph database query languages. Unlike articles focusing on graph traversal, which dominated the theoretical literature on graph databases prior to this paper, it analyzed graph query languages that combine graph traversal with queries of the data contained in the nodes."

The main contribution of the paper, according to ICDT officials, is the language called GXPath (short for Graph XPath), which "adapts the XML XPath navigation language to graphs with data. The document shows that GXPathachieves a particularly interesting balance between expressiveness and complexity, enabling expressive queries that can be evaluated efficiently."

In addition, the organizers point out that the 2013 paper and its extended version "Querying Graphs with Data" (J. ACM 2016) have "been cited nearly 200 times (roughly half of the citations for the conference version and half for the journal version). This article is a beautiful illustration of how purely theoretical work can influence practical query languages, especially in the early stages of their development."

It should be noted that this is the second Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data studyFoundational Research on Data receive an award of this kind, which recognizes the quality and durability of the work over time: in 2021, "Information credibility on Twitter" won the"Seoul Test of Time Award, " which, as its name suggests, is awarded annuallyto the author or authors of a scientific article previously presented at the World Wide Web Conference and which has shown great relevance and impact over time. 

Source: IMC UC