HGQL: Supporting Schematic Hypergraphs in GraphQL
Aruna Bansal · 2023
GraphQL, a query language, has gained industry adoption (including GitHub, Coursera, and Neo4j) due to its ability to specify structures for input data as objects at the application level and get query results for the required parts of the matched objects. Traditional GraphQL supports graphs and hierarchical structures. Its functionality can be enhanced by embracing the richness of hypergraphs so that the GraphQL can be employed with hypergraph databases. Hypergraphs are natural mathematical structures capable of representing data and complex relationships in different settings, such as hierarchical, navigational, relational, and semi-structured. In this paper, we propose and present Hypergraph-oriented GraphQL or HGQL that extends the GraphQL’s scope to embrace hypergraphs semantically and syntactically. We formalize the semantics of a class of schematic hypergraphs and queries in the HGQL. We also describe the syntactic details of our approach. Furthermore, we discuss how our proposed approach can be rendered in a hypergraph-oriented implementation.