PG-HIVE: Hybrid Incremental Schema Discovery for Property Graphs

Abstract: Property graphs have rapidly become the de facto standard for representing and managing complex, interconnected data, powering applications across domains from knowledge graphs to social networks. Despite the advantages, their schema-free nature poses major challenges for integration, exploration, visualization, and efficient querying. To bridge this gap, we present PG-HIVE, a novel framework for automatic schema discovery in property graphs. PG-HIVE goes beyond existing approaches by uncovering latent node and edge types, inferring property datatypes, constraints, and cardinalities, and doing so even in the absence of explicit labeling information. Leveraging a unique combination of Locality-Sensitive Hashing with property- and label-based clustering, PG-HIVE identifies structural similarities at scale. Moreover, it introduces incremental schema discovery, eliminating costly recomputation as new data arrives. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that PG-HIVE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art solutions, in both accuracy (by up to 65% for nodes and 40% for edges), and efficiency (up to 1.95x faster execution), unlocking the full potential of schema-aware property graph management.