Knowledge Graph Exploration Systems: are we lost?

Summary: Position paper surveying KG exploration approaches and arguing that mainstream KG data-management neglects exploration needs arising from large, heterogeneous, provenance-rich KGs. Identifies unmet requirements (interaction, summarization, provenance-aware views, explainability, scalable query/analytics) and proposes research directions toward systems that natively support exploration. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 451
Venue: CIDR
Year: 2022
Pagerank: 5.4119882e-05
Overall Rank: 8,520 | 41.55%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Matteo Lissandrini (Aalborg University)
2. Davide Mottin (Aarhus University)
3. Katja Hose (Aalborg University)
4. Torben Bach Pedersen (Aalborg University)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{lissandrini_cidr22,
        address = {Amsterdam, Netherlands},
        series = {{CIDR} '22},
        title = {{Knowledge Graph Exploration Systems: are we lost?}},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {Conference} on {Innovative} {Data} {Systems} {Research}},
        author = {Lissandrini, Matteo and Mottin, Davide and Hose, Katja and Pedersen, Torben Bach},
        year = {2022}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
10,549	Love-at-First-Sight: First Answers Without the Awkward Silence in Big Knowledge Graphs	2026	VLDB	5.093636e-05
10,830	PlanRGCN: Predicting SPARQL Query Performance	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 15 of 15 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
264	The Ubiquity of Large Graphs and Surprising Challenges of Graph Processing	2018	VLDB	0.00022980015
759	The case against specialized graph analytics engines	2015	CIDR	0.00014273591
1,174	Tsunami: A Learned Multi-dimensional Index for Correlated Data and Skewed Workloads	2021	VLDB	0.00011817414
1,198	Overview of Data Exploration Techniques	2015	SIGMOD	0.00011706307
1,924	The Researcher's Guide to the Data Deluge: Querying a Scientific Database in Just a Few Seconds	2011	VLDB	9.4775501e-05
2,973	Functional Dependencies for Graphs	2016	SIGMOD	7.9083516e-05
3,422	SPARQLByE: Querying RDF data by example	2016	VLDB	7.426997e-05
4,025	Beyond Macrobenchmarks: Microbenchmark-based Graph Database Evaluation	2019	VLDB	6.947875e-05
4,395	Automating Exploratory Data Analysis via Machine Learning: An Overview	2020	SIGMOD	6.7271323e-05
7,077	Sapphire: Querying RDF Data Made Simple	2016	VLDB	5.709875e-05
8,218	Sofos: Demonstrating the Challenges of Materialized View Selection on Knowledge Graphs	2021	SIGMOD	5.4644639e-05
8,578	ProgressiveDB – Progressive Data Analytics as a Middleware	2019	VLDB	5.4091471e-05
9,339	Efficient Exploration of Interesting Aggregates in RDF Graphs	2021	SIGMOD	5.2869213e-05
9,340	RDFind: Scalable Conditional Inclusion Dependency Discovery in RDF Datasets	2016	SIGMOD	5.2869213e-05
10,037	Graph Exploration: From Users to Large Graphs	2017	SIGMOD	5.1729561e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	1,198	Overview of Data Exploration Techniques	2015	SIGMOD
2	13,393	KGNav: A Knowledge Graph Navigational Visual Query System	2023	VLDB
3	8,921	Generations of Knowledge Graphs: The Crazy Ideas and the Business Impact	2023	VLDB
4	9,071	Data Lakes Empowered by Knowledge Graph Technologies	2021	SIGMOD
5	4,372	Schemaless and Structureless Graph Querying	2014	VLDB
6	12,075	Graph-based Exploration of Non-graph Datasets	2016	VLDB
7	12,434	Exploratory Keyword Search on Data Graphs	2010	SIGMOD
8	4,687	Knowledge Graphs 2021: A Data Odyssey	2021	VLDB
9	13,317	From Genesis to Maturity: Managing Knowledge Graph Ecosystems Through Life Cycles	2025	VLDB
10	10,037	Graph Exploration: From Users to Large Graphs	2017	SIGMOD