research-article

The complexity of evaluating path expressions in SPARQL

Authors:

Katja Losemann,

Wim MartensAuthors Info & Claims

PODS '12: Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGAI symposium on Principles of Database Systems

Pages 101 - 112

https://doi.org/10.1145/2213556.2213573

Published: 21 May 2012 Publication History

Abstract

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recently introduced property paths in SPARQL 1.1, a query language for RDF data. Property paths allow SPARQL queries to evaluate regular expressions over graph data. However, they differ from standard regular expressions in several notable aspects. For example, they have a limited form of negation, they have numerical occurrence indicators as syntactic sugar, and their semantics on graphs is defined in a non-standard manner. We formalize the W3C semantics of property paths and investigate various query evaluation problems on graphs. More specifically, let x and y be two nodes in an edge-labeled graph and r be an expression. We study the complexities of (1) deciding whether there exists a path from x to y that matches r and (2) counting how many paths from x to y match r. Our main results show that, compared to an alternative semantics of regular expressions on graphs, the complexity of (1) and (2) under W3C semantics is significantly higher. Whereas the alternative semantics remains in polynomial time for large fragments of expressions, the W3C semantics makes problems (1) and (2) intractable almost immediately.

As a side-result, we prove that the membership problem for regular expressions with numerical occurrence indicators and negation is in polynomial time.

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Cited By

García RAngles R(2024)Path Querying in Graph Databases: A Systematic Mapping StudyIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.337197612(33154-33172)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3371976
Arroyuelo DGómez-Brandón ANavarro G(2024)Evaluating regular path queries on compressed adjacency matricesThe VLDB Journal10.1007/s00778-024-00885-634:1Online publication date: 26-Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00778-024-00885-6
Arroyuelo DGómez-Brandón ANavarro G(2023)Evaluating Regular Path Queries on Compressed Adjacency MatricesString Processing and Information Retrieval10.1007/978-3-031-43980-3_4(35-48)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-43980-3_4
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Index Terms

The complexity of evaluating path expressions in SPARQL
1. Information systems
  1. Data management systems
    1. Query languages

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cover image ACM Conferences

PODS '12: Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGAI symposium on Principles of Database Systems

May 2012

332 pages

ISBN:9781450312486

DOI:10.1145/2213556

Editor:
Markus Krötzsch
University of Oxford, UK
,
General Chair:
Maurizio Lenzerini
University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy
,
Program Chair:
Michael Benedikt
University of Oxford, UK

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

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Published: 21 May 2012

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SIGMOD/PODS '12: International Conference on Management of Data

May 21 - 23, 2012

Arizona, Scottsdale, USA

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PODS '12 Paper Acceptance Rate 26 of 101 submissions, 26%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 642 of 2,707 submissions, 24%

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Cited By

García RAngles R(2024)Path Querying in Graph Databases: A Systematic Mapping StudyIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.337197612(33154-33172)Online publication date: 2024
Arroyuelo DGómez-Brandón ANavarro G(2024)Evaluating regular path queries on compressed adjacency matricesThe VLDB Journal10.1007/s00778-024-00885-634:1Online publication date: 26-Nov-2024
Arroyuelo DGómez-Brandón ANavarro G(2023)Evaluating Regular Path Queries on Compressed Adjacency MatricesString Processing and Information Retrieval10.1007/978-3-031-43980-3_4(35-48)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2023
Bonifati AFletcher GVoigt HYakovets N(2022)Querying GraphsundefinedOnline publication date: 25-Feb-2022
Guo XGao HZou Z(2021)Distributed processing of regular path queries in RDF graphsKnowledge and Information Systems10.1007/s10115-020-01536-263:4(993-1027)Online publication date: 13-Jan-2021
Bourhis PReutter JVrgoč D(2020)JSONInformation Systems10.1016/j.is.2019.10147889:COnline publication date: 1-Mar-2020
Hellings J(2020)Explaining Results of Path Queries on GraphsSoftware Foundations for Data Interoperability and Large Scale Graph Data Analytics10.1007/978-3-030-61133-0_7(84-98)Online publication date: 6-Nov-2020
Fionda VPirrò GConsens MKejriwal MLopez VSequeda J(2019)Querying knowledge graphs with extended property pathsSemantic Web10.3233/SW-19036510:6(1127-1168)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2019
Mou XChen HLi Y(2019)Context-Free Grammars for Deterministic Regular Expressions with InterleavingTheoretical Aspects of Computing – ICTAC 201910.1007/978-3-030-32505-3_14(235-252)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2019
Cheng JMa ZTong Q(2018)RDF Storage and QueryingInformation Retrieval and Management10.4018/978-1-5225-5191-1.ch019(415-433)Online publication date: 2018
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