Temporal GraphQL: A Tree Grammar Approach

This paper presents a novel system, called Temporal GraphQL, for supporting temporal data in web services. A temporal web service is a service that provides a temporal view of data, that is, a view of the current data as well as past or future states of the data. Capturing the history of the data is important in data forensics, data auditing, and subscriptions, where an application continuously reads data. GraphQL is a technology for improving the development and management of web services. Originally developed by Facebook and widely used in industry, GraphQL is a query language for web services. This paper introduces Temporal GraphQL. We show how to use tree grammars to model GraphQL schemas, data, and queries, and propose temporal tree grammars to model Temporal GraphQL. We extend GraphQL with temporal snapshot, slice, and delta operators. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on Temporal GraphQL and temporal tree grammars.

Authors

• Curtis E. Dyreson
• Bishal Sarkar

Keywords

• Temporal databases
• temporal queries
• GraphQL
• web services