MQL Guide

General

Cayley's MQL implementation is a work-in-progress clone of Freebase's MQL API. At the moment, it supports very basic queries without some of the extended features. It also aims to be database-agnostic, meaning that the schema inference from Freebase does not (yet) apply.

Every JSON Object can be thought of as a node in the graph, and wrapping an object in a list means there may be several of these, or it may be repeated. A simple query like:

[{
  "id": null
}]

Is equivalent to all nodes in the graph, where "id" is the special keyword for the value of the node.

Predicates are added to the object to specify constraints.

[{
  "id": null,
  "some_predicate": "some value"
}]

Predicates can take as values objects or lists of objects (subqueries), strings and numbers (literal IDs that must match -- equivalent to the object {"id": "value"}) or null, which indicates that, while the object must have a predicate that matches, the matching values will replace the null. A single null is one such value, an empty list will be filled with all such values, as strings.

Keywords

• id: The value of the node.

Reverse Predicates

Predicates always assume a forward direction. That is,

[{
  "id": "A",
  "some_predicate": "B"
}]

will only match if the quad

A some_predicate B .

exists. In order to reverse the directions, "!predicates" are used. So that:

[{
  "id": "A",
  "!some_predicate": "B"
}]

will only match if the quad

B some_predicate A .

exists.

Multiple Predicates

JSON does not specify the behavior of objects with the same key. In order to have separate constraints for the same predicate, the prefix "@name:" can be applied to any predicate. This is slightly different from traditional MQL in that fully-qualified http paths may be common predicates, so we have an "@name:" prefix instead.

[{
  "id": "A",
  "@x:some_predicate": "B",
  "@y:some_predicate": "C"

}]

Will only match if both

A some_predicate B .
A some_predicate C .

exist.

This combines with the reversal rule to create paths like "@a:!some_predicate"