Rule-based graph repairing: semantic and efficient repairing methods

Real-life graph datasets extracted from Web are inevitably full of incompleteness, conflicts, and redundancies, so graph data cleaning shows its necessity. One of the main issues is to automatically repair the graph with some repairing rules. Although rules like data dependencies have been widely studied in relational data repairing, very few works exist to repair the graph data. In this paper, we introduce an automatic repairing semantic for graphs, called Graph-Repairing Rules (GRRs). This semantic can capture the incompleteness, conflicts, and redundancies in the graphs and indicate how to correct these errors. We study three fundamental problems associated with GRRs, implication, consistency and termination, which show whether a given set of GRRs make sense. Repairing the graph data using GRRs involves a problem of finding isomorphic subgraphs of the graph data for each GRR, which is NP-complete. To efficiently circumvent the complex calculation of subgraph isomorphism, we design a decomposition-And-join strategy to solve this problem. Extensive experiments on real datasets show that our GRR semantic and corresponding repairing algorithms can effectively and efficiently repair real-life graph data.