WebGraph is a framework for graph compression aimed at studying web graphs. It provides simple ways to manage very large graphs, exploiting modern compression techniques. The big version is a fork of the original WebGraph that can handle more than 231 nodes. For more details on WebGraph that are common between the standard and the big version, please see WebGraph. WebGraph is free software distributed under either the GNU Lesser General Public License 2.1+ or the Apache Software License 2.0.

Main differences

If you are used to WebGraph, the main difference is that nodes are indexed by long integers. Correspondingly, iterators on nodes are LazyLongIterators, and all array-based methods (such as ImmutableGraph.successorBigArray(long) or ArcLabelledImmutableGraph.labelBigArray(long)) return big arrays.

Some classes have not been ported, and will be ported on an “as-needed” basis.

Porting code

If you want to port code written for WebGraph to the big version, the main nuisance is the fact that ImmutableGraph.successorBigArray(long) returns, as the name says, a big array, which cannot be accessed like a standard Java array. Watch out in particular for accesses to the length field, which will be syntactically correct even on a big array, but must be replaced by calls to a suitable method (e.g., BigArrays.length(long[][])). In general, you must get accustomed to big-array methods before porting code.

To simplify many mundane matters, such as unit tests, ImmutableGraph provides two static wrapping methods (ImmutableGraph.wrap(it.unimi.dsi.webgraph.ImmutableGraph) and ImmutableGraph.wrap(ImmutableGraph)) that turn a standard ImmutableGraph into a big ImmutableGraph and viceversa. Thus, for instance, there is no big version of ArrayListMutableGraph: it is expected that instances will be just wrapped should you need to use them in the big framework.

Compatibility

The serialisation format of the standard and big versions of BVGraph are compatible (but you cannot load a graph with more than 231 elements using the standard version). The same graph loaded with instances of the two classes, however, will not by equal. You must wrap one or the other (see above) to check for equality.

Note also that usually satellite data generated by various utilities (e.g., StronglyConnectedComponents) are written using formats that are not compatible.

Packages
Package
Description
Main classes implementing the WebGraph algorithms.
Classes implementing useful algorithms on graphs.
Example classes that do nice things using the WebGraph framework.
Main classes implementing labelling for immutable graphs.