A graph is used to represent data in which the relationships between the objects in the data are at least as important as the objects themselves. Over the last two decades nearly a hundred file formats have been proposed or used to provide portable access to such data. This paper seeks to review these formats, and provide some insight to both reduce the ongoing creation of unnecessary formats, and guide the development of new formats where needed.
One additional paper to consider is @cite_10 , which was written specifically with the view of designing a new, more universal graph format. We deliberately avoid this approach in order to avoid bias in our discussion.
@cite_10
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Prompted by the increasing demand for a standard exchange format for graph data, an informal workshop was held in conjunction with Graph Drawing 2000. The participants identified requirements for such a standard and formed a group to work out a proposal. The current status of this effort is publicly available at http: www.graphdrawing.org data format .