  Graphs have been widely used in many applications such as social networks,
collaboration networks, and biological networks. One important graph analytics
is to explore cohesive subgraphs in a large graph. Among several cohesive
subgraphs studied, k-core is one that can be computed in linear time for a
static graph. Since graphs are evolving in real applications, in this paper, we
study core maintenance which is to reduce the computational cost to compute
k-cores for a graph when graphs are updated from time to time dynamically. We
identify drawbacks of the existing efficient algorithm, which needs a large
search space to find the vertices that need to be updated, and has high
overhead to maintain the index built, when a graph is updated. We propose a new
order-based approach to maintain an order, called k-order, among vertices,
while a graph is updated. Our new algorithm can significantly outperform the
state-of-the-art algorithm up to 3 orders of magnitude for the 11 large real
graphs tested. We report our findings in this paper.
