What we talk about when we talk about graphs
George Fletcher · 2013
An old idea from the humanistic sciences has it that the language we use not only restricts the manner in which we view the world, but also, in a very real sense, shapes the world around us. This view has deep roots across fields as diverse as anthropology, linguistics, and philosophy. Recently, my colleagues and I have been exploring the interesting ways in which this idea manifests itself in data management. In particular, we have been studying the expressive power of graph query languages at the instance level, where the focus is on characterizing the ability of languages to restrict and shape concrete graph instances, purely in terms of the structure of the instances.