Network Data File Formats

The Hitchhikers Guide to Sharing Graph Data

“…There have been a number of other efforts to gather similar information on graph exchange formats by researchers [2]- [4] and software distributors [5], [6]. The results provided inspiration for some of the descriptors used here, but this work aims at being more comprehensive.…”

“…We surveyed approximately 100 possible formats, and include detailed data on 76, as compared to 7 in [3], 28 in [4], 5 in [5] and 11 in [6]. Bodlaj [2] considers a similar number of formats in general terms, but only 14 in detail, and with a different focus: for instance they provide more information on software support for formats than we provide here.…”

“…The list of potential software is long, even more so than the list of formats, so we won't try to survey them here as well. Instead we refer readers to [2], which contains a cross-section of both formats and their software support.…”

Unravelling Graph-Exchange File Formats

“…There have been a number of other efforts to gather similar information on graph exchange formats by researchers [2]- [4] and software distributors [5], [6]. The results provided inspiration for some of the descriptors used here, but this paper aims to provide a more comprehensive summary.…”

“…The only generic (language independent) format that seems to allow this is NetML [58]. Any procedural approach admits the possibility of defining a method for constructive graph description, 2 There is one exception to this: Cluto stores sparse matrices in a format more closely resembling the neighbour representation. but we do not automatically count any procedural approach as constructive, unless it provides explicit graph-related operations as part of the toolkit.…”