Graph Modelling Language

Not to be confused with GraphML.

Filename extension	.gml
Internet media type	text/vnd.gml
Developed by	Michael Himsolt

Graph Modeling Language (GML) is a hierarchical ASCII-based file format for describing graphs. It has been also named Graph Meta Language.

Example

A simple graph in GML format:

graph [  comment "This is a sample graph"  directed 1  id 42  label "Hello, I am a graph"  node [   id 1   label "node 1"   thisIsASampleAttribute 42  ]  node [   id 2   label "node 2"   thisIsASampleAttribute 43  ]  node [   id 3   label "node 3"   thisIsASampleAttribute 44  ]  edge [   source 1   target 2   label "Edge from node 1 to node 2"  ]  edge [   source 2   target 3   label "Edge from node 2 to node 3"  ]  edge [   source 3   target 1   label "Edge from node 3 to node 1"  ] ] 

Applications supporting GML

• Cytoscape, an open source bioinformatics software platform for visualizing molecular interaction networks, loads and save previously-constructed interaction networks in GML.
• igraph, an open source network analysis library with interfaces to multiple programming languages.
• Gephi, an open source graph visualization and manipulation software.
• Graph-tool, a free Python module for manipulation and statistical analysis of graphs.
• NetworkX, an open source Python library for studying complex graphs.
• Tulip (software) is a free software in the domain of information visualisation capable of manipulating huge graphs (with more than 1.000.000 elements).
• yEd, a free Java-based graph editor, supports import from and export to GML.
• The Graphviz project includes two command-line tools (gml2gv and gv2gml) that can convert to and from the DOT file format.
• Wolfram Language, a general very high-level programming language, supports GML import and export.

See also

• Graph Query Language (GQL)
• DGML

References

^[1]

1. Plenz, M., Frank, A., Graph Language Models, 2401.07105, cs.CL, 2024, https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.07105, access date: 2025-07-03

External links

• GML: A portable Graph File Format, Michael Himsolt - 2010/11/30 (archived version)
• Unravelling Graph-Exchange File Formats, by Matthew Roughan and Jonathan Tuke, 2015, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.02781.pdf