Relaxing graph pattern matching with explanations

Traditional graph pattern matching is based on subgraph isomorphism, which is often too restrictive to identify meaningful matches. To handle this, taxonomy subgraph isomorphism has been proposed to relax the label constraints in the matching. Nonetheless, there are many cases that cannot be covered. In this study,we first formalize taxonomy simulation, a natural matching semantics combing graph simulation with taxonomy, and propose its pattern relaxation to enrich graph pattern matching results with taxonomy information. We also design topological ranking and diversified topological ranking for top-k relaxations. We then study the top-k pattern relaxation problems, by providing their static analyses, and developing algorithms and optimization for finding and evaluating top-k pattern relaxations. We further propose a notion of explanations for answers to the relaxations and develop algorithms to compute explanations. These together give us a framework for enriching the results of graph pattern matching. Using real-life datasets, we experimentally verify that our framework and techniques are effective and efficient for identifying meaningful matches in practice.