On Querying Historical Connectivity in Temporal Graphs

We study the historical connectivity query in temporal graphs where edges continuously arrive. Given an arbitrary time window, and two query vertices, the problem aims to identify if two vertices are connected by a path in the snapshot of the window. The state-of-the-art method designs an index based on the two-hop cover, and updating the index is costly when new edges arrive. In this paper, we propose a new framework and design a novel forest-based index for historical connectivity queries. The index enables us to answer queries by searching if two vertices are connected in the forest. We update the index by modifying a forest structure. Our techniques also work for connectivity query processing in a sliding window of temporal graphs. Extensive experiments have been conducted to show the considerable advantages of our approach compared with the state-of-the-art methods in both historical connectivity queries and sliding-window connectivity queries.