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3. Using VFLib: a quick tour

VFLib deals with simple directed graphs, i.e. the graphs cannot contain self-loops, edge (i,j) is considered different from edge (j,i), and between two nodes there is at most one edge.

Nodes are identified through values of type node_id, defined in the header argraph.h, which corresponds to unsigned 16-bit integers. The first node has an id equal to 0. The value NULL_NODE (corresponding to 2^16 - 1, i.e. 65535) is used as a null node id, so the valid ids are from 0 to 65534, and the graph can contain at most 65535 nodes. Edges are identified through a pair of node ids.

The library has been expressly designed to perform only one operation, i.e. graph matching, and all the classes and the data structures have been chosen in such a way to make this operation fast, especially on large graphs.

Unfortunately, this means that the library interface can be a little bit cumbersome with respect to some tasks which are instead quite simple with other libraries.

In the following you will find a short description, together with code fragments, that illustrates the following steps needed to perorm the matching:


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