Alex Rivera | Logout

Calculate length of path between nodes?

Asked 2011-03-04T20:26:31.067
9

How can I retrieve the length of a path between two nodes? For instance, given an organizational hierarchy, how can I determine how far separated are a parent and an descendant organization? Consider the following scenarios:

  1. OrgA -hasSubOrganization-> OrgB, OrgC

    This is the very simplistic case where I want to get all the immediate suborganizations of an entity. Hence the path length is 1.

  2. OrgA -> OrgB -> OrgC

    or the general case

    OrgA -> OrgB - - - - - - - - OrgZ

I want to recursively traverse down the graph and find each organization belonging to another organization through the hasSubOrganization property. To get all the sub-organizations recursive I can use property paths, e.g., the + operator:

OrgA hasSubOrganization+ ?subOrg

This will give me all the suborganizations right down to the leaf nodes. But my ultimate goal is to build the organization hierarchy, but the information about the "Number of nodes/steps/levels/hops away a suborganization is" is lost. This means that I cannot recreate the org structure for a visualization.

How can I capture the "number of nodes away" information in addition to the name of the suborganization?

rdf sparql jena
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1 Answer

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You can't do this using propery paths since the working group specifically chose not to make this information available as it makes implementation much more complex.

If you want to generate a hierarchy it will probably be just as efficient to make a whole series of SPARQL queries where each query expands one leaf of the hierarchy and not use property paths at all if your goal is just to visualise the hierarchy

There may be other approaches using the Jena Ontology API - I'd recommend asking on their mailing list jena-users@incubator.apache.org for more expert help

answered 2011-03-05T09:16:29.200

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