Graph Pattern Matching with Expressive Outerplanar Graph Patterns

Abstract

An outerplanar graph is a planar graph that can be embedded in the plane in such a way that all vertices lie on the outer boundary. Outerplanar graphs express many chemical compounds. An externally extensible outerplanar graph pattern (eeo-graph pattern for short) represents a graph pattern common to a finite set of outerplanar graphs, like a dataset of chemical compounds. The eeo-graph pattern can express a substructure common to blocks that appear in outerplanar graph structured data. In this paper, we propose a polynomial time algorithm for deciding whether or not a given eeo-graph pattern matches a given connected outerplanar graph. Moreover, we show the expressiveness of the pattern class by experiments on a chemical compound database.