Querying semi-structured data with graph grammars

Recently research has deeply investigated the problem of querying semi-structured data and data which can be represented by means of graphs (e.g. object-oriented data, XML data, etc.). Typically queries on graph-like data, called path queries, are expressed by means of regular expressions denoting paths in the graph. The result of a path query is the set of nodes reachable by means of a path expressed by a specified regular expression. In this paper we investigate the problem of extracting a subgraph satisfying a given property from a given graph representing some information. We propose a new form of queries, called graph queries, whose answers are (marked) graphs having a particular structure, extracted from the source graph. We show that a simple form of graph grammars can be profitably used to define graph queries. The result of a graph query, using a grammar G over a database D, is a subgraph of D 'matching' a graph derived from G.