Finding shortest distance between two vertices in a graph is an important
problem due to its numerous applications in diverse domains, including
geo-spatial databases, social network analysis, and information retrieval.
Classical algorithms (such as, Dijkstra) solve this problem in polynomial time,
but these algorithms cannot provide real-time response for a large number of
bursty queries on a large graph. So, indexing based solutions that pre-process
the graph for efficiently answering (exactly or approximately) a large number
of distance queries in real-time is becoming increasingly popular. Existing
solutions have varying performance in terms of index size, index building time,
query time, and accuracy. In this work, we propose T OP C OM , a novel
indexing-based solution for exactly answering distance queries. Our experiments
with two of the existing state-of-the-art methods (IS-Label and TreeMap) show
the superiority of T OP C OM over these two methods considering scalability and
query time. Besides, indexing of T OP C OM exploits the DAG (directed acyclic
graph) structure in the graph, which makes it significantly faster than the
existing methods if the SCCs (strongly connected component) of the input graph
are relatively small
