research-article

The complexity of regular expressions and property paths in SPARQL

Authors:

Katja Losemann,

Wim MartensAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), Volume 38, Issue 4

Article No.: 24, Pages 1 - 39

https://doi.org/10.1145/2494529

Published: 04 December 2013 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-structured 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 nonstandard 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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The complexity of regular expressions and property paths in SPARQL

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cover image ACM Transactions on Database Systems

ACM Transactions on Database Systems Volume 38, Issue 4

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November 2013

294 pages

ISSN:0362-5915

EISSN:1557-4644

DOI:10.1145/2539032

Editor:
Z. Meral Özsoyoğlu
ACM Transactions on Database Systems

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Publication History

Published: 04 December 2013

Accepted: 01 May 2013

Received: 01 September 2012

Published in TODS Volume 38, Issue 4

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https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3371976
Martens WNiewerth MPopp TRojas CVansummeren SVrgoč D(2023)Representing Paths in Graph Database Pattern MatchingProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3587136.358715116:7(1790-1803)Online publication date: 8-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.14778/3587136.3587151
Figueira DRomero MGeerts FNgo HSintos S(2023)Conjunctive Regular Path Queries under Injective SemanticsProceedings of the 42nd ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGAI Symposium on Principles of Database Systems10.1145/3584372.3588664(231-240)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3584372.3588664
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