Recent years have witnessed a growing renewed interest in the use of graphs as a reliable means for representing and modeling data. Thereby, graphs enable to ensure efficiency in various fields of computer science, especially for massive data where graphs arise as a promising alternative to relational databases for big data modeling. In this regard, querying data graph proves to be a crucial task to explore the knowledge in these datasets.

In this dissertation, we investigate two main problems. In the first part we address the problem of detecting patterns in larger graphs, called the top-k graph pattern matching problem. We introduce a new graph pattern matching model named Relaxed Graph Simulation (RGS), to identify significant matches and to avoid the empty-set answer problem. We formalize and study the top-k matching problem based on two classes of functions, relevance and diversity, for ranking the matches according to the RGS model. We also consider the diversified top-k matching problem, and we propose a diversification function to balance relevance and diversity. Moreover, we provide efficient algorithms based on optimization strategies to compute the top-k and the diversified top-k matches according to the proposed model. The proposed approach is optimal in terms of search time and flexible in terms of applicability. The analyze of the time complexity of the proposed algorithms and the extensive experiments on real-life datasets demonstrate both the effectiveness and the efficiency of these approaches.

In the second part, we tackle the problem of graph querying using aggregated search paradigm. We consider this problem for particular types of graphs that are trees, and we deal with the query processing in XML documents. Firstly, we give the motivation behind the use of such a paradigm, and we explain the potential benefits compared to traditional querying approaches. Furthermore, we propose a new method for aggregated tree search, based on approximate tree matching algorithm on several tree fragments, that aims to build, the extent possible, a coherent and complete answer by combining several results. The proposed solutions are shown to be efficient in terms of relevance and quality on different real-life datasets.