Abstract

Abstract—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. Keywords-Graph, network, XML, GraphML, GML, database, data exchange, data representation.