ViSual: An HCI-inspired simulator for blending visual subgraph query construction and processing

Abstract

In [3], we laid out the vision of a novel graph query processing paradigm, where visual subgraph query formulation is interleaved (or “blended”) with query processing by exploiting the latency offered by the gui. Our recent attempts at implementing this vision [6], [7] do not provide any robust framework to systematically investigate the performance of this novel paradigm. This is because it is prohibitively expensive to engage a large number of users to formulate a large number of visual queries in order to measure the performance of blending query formulation with query processing. In this demonstration, we present a novel synthetic visual subgraph query simulator called ViSual that can evaluate the performance of this paradigm for a large number of visual subgraph queries without requiring a large number of users to formulate them. Specifically, it leverages principles from hci to quantify the gui latency that is necessary to realistically simulate blending of query formulation and query processing.