Domagoj Vrgoč receives Test of Time award at ICDT.

March, 2023.-"Querying Graph Databases with XPath" is the title of the paper by. Domagoj Vrgočone of the papers distinguished with the "Test of time" award during the International Conference on Extending Database Technology(ICDT), the most important event in the world in the area of databases and whose 2023 version is being held this week in Ioannina, Greece.

The "Test of Time" award was established in 2013 by the organizers of ICDT to recognize the research presented during the decade prior to each edition of the conference and which, as its name indicates, has best withstood the passage of time. In the 26th version, 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 during the last ten years: one of them is precisely the study prepared by Vrgoč together with Leonid Libkin (U. of Edinburgh, Scotland) and Wim Martens (University of Bayreuth, Germany).

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

The main contribution of the paper, add the ICDT managers, is the language called GXPath (short for Graph XPath) that "adapts the XML navigation language XPath to data-driven graphs. The paper shows that GXPathstrikes a particularly interesting balance between expressiveness and complexity, allowing expressive queries to be evaluated efficiently.

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

It is worth noting that this is the second research of the Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data to receive an award of these characteristics, which recognizes the quality and resistance to the passage of time of the works: in 2021 "Information credibility on Twitter" obtained the "Seoul Test of Time Award", which, as its name indicates, is awarded annually to 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