Containment of Simple Conjunctive Regular Path Queries
Diego Figueira, Adwait Godbole, Shankara Narayanan Krishna, Wim Martens, Matthias Niewerth, Tina Trautner
Abstract
Testing containment of queries is a fundamental reasoning task in knowledge representation. We study here the containment problem for Conjunctive Regular Path Queries (CRPQs), a navigational query language extensively used in ontology and graph database querying. While it is known that containment of CRPQs is EXPSPACE-complete in general, we focus here on severely restricted fragments, which are known to be highly relevant in practice according to several recent studies. We obtain a detailed overview of the complexity of the containment problem, depending on the features used in the regular expressions of the queries, with completeness results for NP, Pi2p, PSPACE or EXPSPACE.