A Trichotomy for Regular Trail Queries

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Martens, Wim, Niewerth, Matthias, Popp, Tina
Format: Preprint
Published: 2019
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author Martens, Wim
Niewerth, Matthias
Popp, Tina
author_facet Martens, Wim
Niewerth, Matthias
Popp, Tina
contents Regular path queries (RPQs) are an essential component of graph query languages. Such queries consider a regular expression r and a directed edge-labeled graph G and search for paths in G for which the sequence of labels is in the language of r. In order to avoid having to consider infinitely many paths, some database engines restrict such paths to be trails, that is, they only consider paths without repeated edges. In this paper we consider the evaluation problem for RPQs under trail semantics, in the case where the expression is fixed. We show that, in this setting, there exists a trichotomy. More precisely, the complexity of RPQ evaluation divides the regular languages into the finite languages, the class Ttract (for which the problem is tractable), and the rest. Interestingly, the tractable class in the trichotomy is larger than for the trichotomy for simple paths, discovered by Bagan, Bonifati, and Groz [JCSS 2020]. In addition to this trichotomy result, we also study characterizations of the tractable class, its expressivity, the recognition problem, closure properties, and show how the decision problem can be extended to the enumeration problem, which is relevant to practice.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_1903_00226
institution arXiv
publishDate 2019
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Trichotomy for Regular Trail Queries
Martens, Wim
Niewerth, Matthias
Popp, Tina
Formal Languages and Automata Theory
Databases
Logic in Computer Science
Regular path queries (RPQs) are an essential component of graph query languages. Such queries consider a regular expression r and a directed edge-labeled graph G and search for paths in G for which the sequence of labels is in the language of r. In order to avoid having to consider infinitely many paths, some database engines restrict such paths to be trails, that is, they only consider paths without repeated edges. In this paper we consider the evaluation problem for RPQs under trail semantics, in the case where the expression is fixed. We show that, in this setting, there exists a trichotomy. More precisely, the complexity of RPQ evaluation divides the regular languages into the finite languages, the class Ttract (for which the problem is tractable), and the rest. Interestingly, the tractable class in the trichotomy is larger than for the trichotomy for simple paths, discovered by Bagan, Bonifati, and Groz [JCSS 2020]. In addition to this trichotomy result, we also study characterizations of the tractable class, its expressivity, the recognition problem, closure properties, and show how the decision problem can be extended to the enumeration problem, which is relevant to practice.
title A Trichotomy for Regular Trail Queries
topic Formal Languages and Automata Theory
Databases
Logic in Computer Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.00226