Model Verification in Graph Databases and its Application in Neo4j

This work introduces a concept for rule based model verification using a graph database on the example of Neo4j and its query language Cypher. An approach is provided that allows to define verification rules using a graph query language to detect transformation errors within a given domain model. The approach is presented based on a running example, showing its capability of detecting randomly generated errors in a transformation process. Additionally, the method’s performance is evaluated using multiple subsets of the IMDb movie data with a maximum of 17,000,000 nodes and 41,000,000 relationships. This performance evaluation is carried out in comparison to the Object Constraint Language, showing advantages in the context of highly connected datasets with a high number of nodes. Another benefit is the utilization of a well established graph database as verification tool without any need for re-implementing graph and pattern matching logic.