Graph Attribution Through Sub-Graphs

Abstract

We offer an alternative to the standard way of formalising attributed graphs. We propose to represent them as graphs with a marked sub-graph that represents the data domain, rather than as tuples of graph and algebra. This is a general construction which can be shown to preserve adhesiveness of categories; it has the advantage of uniformity and gives more flexibility in defining data abstractions. We show equivalence of our formalisation with the standard one, under a suitable encoding of algebras as graphs.