MQuery: A query language for scientific meshes

Several scientific domains operate on mesh data structures. Computations on meshes share a set of basic abstractions which relates to topological and geometric structure of meshes. Due to the complexity of modeling and querying meshes, the database community has neglected the need for a dedicated mesh database and in particular a high-level mesh query language. Currently, such computations is done by using general-purpose programming languages. Such implementations are tightly coupled with dataset characteristics and thus are less reusable, their maintenance cost is high, and their performance is limited to the memory size. In this paper, we describe syntax and semantic of a high-level query language for scientific meshes (called MQuery) with a level of abstraction that can express queries based on topological and geometric navigations. The language is build on top of a graph-based conceptual mesh data model. We report our results comparing two implementations of the language on top of relational and graph databases with a mesh library.