State Sensitive Queries

A feature of GUESS (as of the .6 release) is the ability to query for matching nodes across multiple states using a “subscript” operator. For example, if we saved the state of the graph and called the state “oldorg” (for the “old organization”) of an node. We could say:

v44[‘oldorg’].dept

To access the value of node v44’s old department. Alternatively, if we had different layouts at different states (states 1,2,3,…) we could ask for the old coordinates for a node by doing:

v44[1].x and v44[1].y

to get the x and y coordinates at state 1

Note that at present we do not support changing these values (e.g. v44[1].x = 20 will return an error).

If we want to do comparisons or selections across multiple states it is possible to use the same subscript syntax on the field variables. For example, if we define two states, 1999 and 2000, and have different frequencies of communication across the social network edges we could find all edges where individuals communicated more in 2000 than 1999 by doing:

freq[2000] > freq[1999]

Note that you can mix this with standard queries. For example, all edges that are in that set above and are currently visible:

(freq[2000] > freq[1999]) & (Edge.visible == 1)