Unravelling Graph-Exchange File Formats
This work addresses the proliferation of graph file formats, which is a problem for researchers and developers in graph data management, but it is incremental as it focuses on review and guidance rather than introducing new methods.
The paper reviewed nearly a hundred graph file formats proposed over two decades to represent data where relationships are as important as objects, aiming to reduce unnecessary format creation and guide future development.
A graph is used to represent data in which the relationships between the objects in the data are at least as important as the objects themselves. Over the last two decades nearly a hundred file formats have been proposed or used to provide portable access to such data. This paper seeks to review these formats, and provide some insight to both reduce the ongoing creation of unnecessary formats, and guide the development of new formats where needed.