Date of Submission
Fall 12-15-2021
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science in Computer Science (MSCS)
Department
Computer Science
Committee Chair/First Advisor
Dr. Ramazan Aygun
Chair
Dr. Rebecca Rutherfoord
Committee Member
Dr. Yong Shi
Committee Member
Dr. Junggab Son
Abstract
In recent decades, there has been a significant increase in the use of smart devices and sensors that led to high-volume temporal data generation. Temporal modeling and querying of this huge data have been essential for effective querying and retrieval. However, custom temporal models have the problem of generalizability, whereas the extended temporal models require users to adapt to new querying languages. In this thesis, we propose a method to improve the modeling and retrieval of temporal data using an existing graph database system (i.e., Neo4j) without extending with additional operators. Our work focuses on temporal data represented as intervals (event with a start and end time). We propose a novel way of storing temporal interval as cartesian points where the start time and the end time are stored as the x and y axis of the cartesian coordinate. We present how queries based on Allen’s interval relationships can be represented using our model on a cartesian coordinate system by visualizing these queries. Temporal queries based on Allen’s temporal intervals are then used to validate our model and compare with the traditional way of storing temporal intervals (i.e., as attributes of nodes). Our experimental results on a soccer graph database with around 4000 games show that the spatial representation of temporal interval can provide significant performance (up to 3.5 times speedup) gains compared to a traditional model.