Meta-Property Graphs: Extending Property Graphs with Metadata Awareness and Reification
Sepehr Sadoughi, Nikolay Yakovets, George Fletcher
TL;DR
The paper addresses the gap in property graphs' handling of metadata by proposing Meta-Property Graphs (MPGs), a backwards-compatible extension that treats labels and properties as first-class data and supports reification. It introduces MetaGPML, an MPG-aware extension of GPML, and provides a formal MPG model along with detailed semantics for querying and pattern matching. The contributions include a formal graph data model, a corresponding query language that handles metadata objects, and illustrative examples showing metadata promotion/demotion and subgraph reification for governance and analytics. This work enables metadata-aware graph management aligned with ISO-standard tooling, enhancing data integration, governance, and knowledge reasoning on graphs.
Abstract
The ISO standard Property Graph model has become increasingly popular for representing complex, interconnected data. However, it lacks native support for querying metadata and reification, which limits its abilities to deal with the demands of modern applications. We introduce the vision of Meta-Property Graphs, a backwards compatible extension of the property graph model addressing these limitations. Our approach enables first-class treatment of labels and properties as queryable objects and supports reification of substructures in a graph. We propose MetaGPML, a backwards compatible extension of the Graph Pattern Matching Language forming the core of the ISO standard GQL, to query these enhanced graphs. We demonstrate how these foundations pave the way for advanced data analytics and governance tasks that are challenging or impossible with current property graph systems.