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GraphSON Format

Dan LaRocque edited this page Sep 5, 2014 · 11 revisions
This is the documentation for Faunus 0.4.
Faunus was merged into Titan and renamed Titan-Hadoop in version 0.5.
Documentation for the latest Titan version is available at http://s3.thinkaurelius.com/docs/titan/current.

  • InputFormat: com.thinkaurelius.faunus.formats.graphson.GraphSONInputFormat
  • OutputFormat: com.thinkaurelius.faunus.formats.graphson.GraphSONOutputFormat

GraphSON is a JSON based graph format developed by TinkerPop with readers and writers provided by Blueprints. Faunus makes use of a slight variation of the typical form that is:

  • vertex-centric: a row in a Faunus GraphSON file is a vertex, its properties, and its incident edges (and their respective properties).
  • long id based: vertex and edge ids must be longs as Faunus uses the long address space for all its graph computing operations.
  • less verbose: a row does not include _type information nor are both _inV and _outV long ids required to be represented by an edge as one of the ids can be inferred from the incident vertex.

The Graph of the Gods dataset deployed with all Aurelius products is represented below in Faunus GraphSON.

{"name":"saturn","type":"titan","_id":0,"_inE":[{"_label":"father","_id":12,"_outV":1}]}
{"name":"jupiter","type":"god","_id":1,"_outE":[{"_label":"lives","_id":13,"_inV":4},{"_label":"brother","_id":16,"_inV":3},{"_label":"brother","_id":14,"_inV":2},{"_label":"father","_id":12,"_inV":0}],"_inE":[{"_label":"brother","_id":17,"_outV":3},{"_label":"brother","_id":15,"_outV":2},{"_label":"father","_id":24,"_outV":7}]}
{"name":"neptune","type":"god","_id":2,"_outE":[{"_label":"lives","_id":20,"_inV":5},{"_label":"brother","_id":19,"_inV":3},{"_label":"brother","_id":15,"_inV":1}],"_inE":[{"_label":"brother","_id":18,"_outV":3},{"_label":"brother","_id":14,"_outV":1}]}
{"name":"pluto","type":"god","_id":3,"_outE":[{"_label":"pet","_id":23,"_inV":11},{"_label":"lives","_id":21,"_inV":6},{"_label":"brother","_id":17,"_inV":1},{"_label":"brother","_id":18,"_inV":2}],"_inE":[{"_label":"brother","_id":19,"_outV":2},{"_label":"brother","_id":16,"_outV":1}]}
{"name":"sky","type":"location","_id":4,"_inE":[{"_label":"lives","_id":13,"_outV":1}]}
{"name":"sea","type":"location","_id":5,"_inE":[{"_label":"lives","_id":20,"_outV":2}]}
{"name":"tartarus","type":"location","_id":6,"_inE":[{"_label":"lives","_id":21,"_outV":3},{"_label":"lives","_id":22,"_outV":11}]}
{"name":"hercules","type":"demigod","_id":7,"_outE":[{"_label":"mother","_id":25,"_inV":8},{"time":1,"_label":"battled","_id":26,"_inV":9},{"time":2,"_label":"battled","_id":27,"_inV":10},{"time":12,"_label":"battled","_id":28,"_inV":11},{"_label":"father","_id":24,"_inV":1}]}
{"name":"alcmene","type":"human","_id":8,"_inE":[{"_label":"mother","_id":25,"_outV":7}]}
{"name":"nemean","type":"monster","_id":9,"_inE":[{"time":1,"_label":"battled","_id":26,"_outV":7}]}
{"name":"hydra","type":"monster","_id":10,"_inE":[{"time":2,"_label":"battled","_id":27,"_outV":7}]}
{"name":"cerberus","type":"monster","_id":11,"_outE":[{"_label":"lives","_id":22,"_inV":6}],"_inE":[{"_label":"pet","_id":23,"_outV":3},{"time":12,"_label":"battled","_id":28,"_outV":7}]}

GraphSON is a space-expensive graph format in that it is a text-based markup language. However, it is convenient for many developers to work with as its structure is simple (easy to create and parse). Note that Faunus only uses GraphSON as one of its supported formats for reading and writing a graph. Within a larger MapReduce job chain, Faunus makes use of a Hadoop’s binary SequenceFile.