Authors:
José Ribas
1
and
Orlando Belo
2
Affiliations:
1
Higher School of Technology and Management, Polytechnic Institute of Viana do Castelo, Portugal
;
2
ALGORITMI R&D Centre / LASI, University of Minho, Portugal
Keyword(s):
Complex System Modelling, Database Models, Graphs, Graph Models, Hypergraphs, Multi-Level Hypergraphs, and Graph Databases.
Abstract:
Graphs are very specialized structures for modelling and representing data objects and their relationships in real-world applications. The number and diversity of graph-based applications existing today are clear testimonies of the importance and relevance of the application of graphs in solving real-world problems. However, more conventional graph structures have difficulty keeping up with the evolving complexity of problems, particularly when they involve n-ary relationships between data objects. This can be overcome using hypergraphs, which allow for representing complex relationships between finite sets of data objects. However, their implementation still has some difficulties, such as the establishment of efficient algebras and computing mechanisms to deal with relational content between entities of a dataset. In this paper, we present an extension to conventional hypergraph-based models for modelling real world problems, proposing a new functional abstraction based on a graph s
tructure with several levels of abstraction. Relationships between data objects are established at each level in a traditional way, while relationships between levels are defined by “levelled” virtual data objects, allowing for the establishment of inheritance relationships between other data objects of sequential levels, through a logical governance structure defining the relational flow between the various levels of the established model. We named this structure as multilevel hypergraph.
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