VISUAL: Simulation of Visual Subgraph Query Formulation to Enable Automated Performance Benchmarking

Visual graph interfaces improve the usability of graph databases by making it easier for users to formulate queries. Recently, a variety of interactive query formulation-based techniques (e.g., blending of visual query construction and processing, visual query suggestions) have been proposed to enhance query performance and usability. Comprehensive user studies are needed to exhaustively and systematically evaluate performance of the proposed techniques, but, unfortunately, user studies are expensive and time consuming. To reduce the cost and time needed, we present a novel synthetic visual subgraph query simulator called VISUAL. VISUAL realistically simulates subgraph query construction without requiring human users. It can automatically generate test subgraph queries having different user-specified characteristics by utilizing the underlying indexes and simulate their formulation based on different query formulation sequences. A key feature of this simulator is that it is built on top of an HCI-inspired, extensible quantitative model which enables us to model the visual query formulation process quantitatively. Our experimental study demonstrates the effectiveness of VISUAL in accurately simulating visual subgraph queries.