Title: Querying Property Graphs with [open]Cypher
Speaker: Petra Selmer
Abstract
Over the past decade, property graph databases have experienced phenomenal growth within industry across multiple domains. openCypher is the project behind the Cypher property graph query language. Originally designed and implemented within the Neo4j graph database to provides expressive and efficient querying of property graph data, it was opened up in 2015 as a universally-available language, and is now being used by more than half a dozen industrial database products, an increasing number of tools & integration products, as well as open-source and research projects, and is at present the most-used language by developers for building property graph applications.
This session will focus on the core principles of openCypher -- namely, pattern matching, path functionality, and how queries are structured -- with reference to the Neo4j Cypher query engine as a basis for understanding the more general principles. We will also discuss Cypher's role as a key input to the in-progress ISO GQL language, which is being worked on under the ISO/IEC framework (the same body that has standardized SQL). We will conclude with a discussion of proposed extensions to the language, including complex pattern matching and composable graph querying, which are being worked on under the auspices of GQL and will make their way into both openCypher and GQL.
Slides
Bio
Dr. Petra Selmer is a member of the Query Languages Standards and Research group at Neo4j, undertaking research into graph query languages and language standards, with the aim of evolving and standardizing property graph querying. She is involved with the openCypher project at www.opencypher.org, and was part of the team designing and optimizing Neo4js Cypher query engine. Under the auspices of ISO/IEC, Petra is currently part of the international standardization efforts to design a stand-alone graph query language, GQL (ISO/IEC 39075), as well as defining property graph query extensions for the next version of SQL (ISO/IEC 9075-16). For many years, she worked as a consultant and developer in a variety of different domains and roles and has a PhD in Computer Science from Birkbeck, University of London, where she researched flexible querying of graph-structured data.