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Expressive languages for path queries over graph-structured data

Published:06 June 2010Publication History

ABSTRACT

For many problems arising in the setting of graph querying (such as finding semantic associations in RDF graphs, exact and approximate pattern matching, sequence alignment, etc.), the power of standard languages such as the widely studied conjunctive regular path queries (CRPQs) is insufficient in at least two ways. First, they cannot output paths and second, more crucially, they cannot express relations among paths.

We thus propose a class of extended CRPQs, called ECRPQs, which add regular relations on tuples of paths, and allow path variables in the heads of queries. We provide several examples of their usefulness in querying graph structured data, and study their properties. We analyze query evaluation and representation of tuples of paths in the output by means of automata. We present a detailed analysis of data and combined complexity of queries, and consider restrictions that lower the complexity of ECRPQs to that of relational conjunctive queries. We study the containment problem, and look at further extensions with first-order features, and with non-regular relations that express arithmetic properties of paths, based on the lengths and numbers of occurrences of labels.

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      • Published in

        cover image ACM Conferences
        PODS '10: Proceedings of the twenty-ninth ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systems
        June 2010
        350 pages
        ISBN:9781450300339
        DOI:10.1145/1807085

        Copyright © 2010 ACM

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 6 June 2010

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