Finding meaningful paths in heterogeneous graphs with PathWays

Abstract

Graphs, and notably RDF graphs, are a prominent way of sharing data. As data usage democratizes, users need help figuring out the useful content of a graph dataset. In particular, journalists with whom we collaborate are interested in identifying, in a graph, the connections between entities, e.g., people, organizations, emails, etc. We present a novel method for exploring data graphs through their data paths connecting Named Entities (NEs, in short); each data path leads to a tabular-looking set of results. NEs are extracted from the data through dedicated Information Extraction modules. Our method builds upon the pre-existing ConnectionLens platform and follow-up work in the Abstra project, which builds simple, visual ER-style summaries of semi-structured data. The contribution of the present work, and its novelty, is twofold. First, we propose a novel analysis of entity-to-entity paths contained in datasets of any nature, and propose a new method for ranking paths, leveraging a novel Information Extraction (IE) module we built on top of ChatGPT. Second, we present an efficient approach to enumerate and compute NE paths, based on an algorithm which automatically recommends sub-paths to materialize, and rewrites the path queries using these subpaths. Our experiments demonstrate the interest of NE paths and the efficiency of our method for computing and ranking them.