PROCESS FOR TRANSFORMING AND CONSULTING DIRECTED AND ATTRIBUTED MULTIGRAPHS BASED ON THE USE OF MAPS AND BITMAPS

摘要

The present invention establishes a process for creating a set of structures that allows efficient storage and subsequent handling. The multigraph is represented using bitmaps with element counters and mappings between values and organized bitmaps to faciliate the handling of the multigraphs. The bits in the bitmaps represent two aspects of the multigraph: 1) indexing of all the objects of the multigraph as a function of their identifiers and 2) connectivity between objects of the multigraph, whether they are vertices or edges. Mappings allow, given a value, accessing the objects of the multigraph which contain such value. Multigraph operations are solved by accessing the mappings and applying logical operations on the bitmaps. This way of representing a graph allows efficiently performing graph operations such as: inserting a vertex or an edge, inserting an attribute, acquiring the incoming and outgoing edges of an attribute, etc.