research-article

Semantics and complexity of SPARQL

Authors:

Marcelo Arenas,

Claudio GutierrezAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), Volume 34, Issue 3

Article No.: 16, Pages 1 - 45

https://doi.org/10.1145/1567274.1567278

Published: 03 September 2009 Publication History

Abstract

SPARQL is the standard language for querying RDF data. In this article, we address systematically the formal study of the database aspects of SPARQL, concentrating in its graph pattern matching facility. We provide a compositional semantics for the core part of SPARQL, and study the complexity of the evaluation of several fragments of the language. Among other complexity results, we show that the evaluation of general SPARQL patterns is PSPACE-complete. We identify a large class of SPARQL patterns, defined by imposing a simple and natural syntactic restriction, where the query evaluation problem can be solved more efficiently. This restriction gives rise to the class of well-designed patterns. We show that the evaluation problem is coNP-complete for well-designed patterns. Moreover, we provide several rewriting rules for well-designed patterns whose application may have a considerable impact in the cost of evaluating SPARQL queries.

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Index Terms

Semantics and complexity of SPARQL
1. Information systems
  1. Data management systems
    1. Query languages

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cover image ACM Transactions on Database Systems

ACM Transactions on Database Systems Volume 34, Issue 3

August 2009

269 pages

ISSN:0362-5915

EISSN:1557-4644

DOI:10.1145/1567274

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2009 ACM.

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Publication History

Published: 03 September 2009

Accepted: 01 June 2009

Revised: 01 December 2008

Received: 01 April 2008

Published in TODS Volume 34, Issue 3

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