84 research outputs found
The ICDT 2016 Test of Time Award Announcement
We describe the 2016 ICDT Test of Time Award which is awarded to Chandra Chekuri and Anand Rajaraman for their 1997 ICDT paper on "Conjunctive Query Containment Revisited"
On Low Treewidth Approximations of Conjunctive Queries
We recently initiated the study of approximations of conjunctive queries within classes that admit tractable query evaluation (with respect to combined complexity). Those include classes of acyclic, bounded treewidth, or bounded hypertreewidth queries. Such approximations are always guaranteed to exist. However, while for acyclic and bounded hypertreewidth queries we have shown a number of examples of interesting approximations, for queries of bounded treewidth the study had been restricted to queries over graphs, where such approximations usually trivialize. In this note we show that for relations of arity greater than two, the notion of low treewidth approximations is a rich one, as many queries possess them. In fact we look at approximations of queries of maximum possible treewidth by queries of minimum possible treewidth (i.e., one), and show that even in this case the structure of approximations remain rather rich as long as input relations are not binary
Tractable Optimization Problems through Hypergraph-Based Structural Restrictions
Several variants of the Constraint Satisfaction Problem have been proposed
and investigated in the literature for modelling those scenarios where
solutions are associated with some given costs. Within these frameworks
computing an optimal solution is an NP-hard problem in general; yet, when
restricted over classes of instances whose constraint interactions can be
modelled via (nearly-)acyclic graphs, this problem is known to be solvable in
polynomial time. In this paper, larger classes of tractable instances are
singled out, by discussing solution approaches based on exploiting hypergraph
acyclicity and, more generally, structural decomposition methods, such as
(hyper)tree decompositions
Approximating acyclicity parameters of sparse hypergraphs
The notions of hypertree width and generalized hypertree width were
introduced by Gottlob, Leone, and Scarcello in order to extend the concept of
hypergraph acyclicity. These notions were further generalized by Grohe and
Marx, who introduced the fractional hypertree width of a hypergraph. All these
width parameters on hypergraphs are useful for extending tractability of many
problems in database theory and artificial intelligence. In this paper, we
study the approximability of (generalized, fractional) hyper treewidth of
sparse hypergraphs where the criterion of sparsity reflects the sparsity of
their incidence graphs. Our first step is to prove that the (generalized,
fractional) hypertree width of a hypergraph H is constant-factor sandwiched by
the treewidth of its incidence graph, when the incidence graph belongs to some
apex-minor-free graph class. This determines the combinatorial borderline above
which the notion of (generalized, fractional) hypertree width becomes
essentially more general than treewidth, justifying that way its functionality
as a hypergraph acyclicity measure. While for more general sparse families of
hypergraphs treewidth of incidence graphs and all hypertree width parameters
may differ arbitrarily, there are sparse families where a constant factor
approximation algorithm is possible. In particular, we give a constant factor
approximation polynomial time algorithm for (generalized, fractional) hypertree
width on hypergraphs whose incidence graphs belong to some H-minor-free graph
class
Evaluating and benchmarking SPARQL query containment solvers
International audienceQuery containment is the problem of deciding if the answers to a query are included in those of another query for any queried database. This problem is very important for query optimization purposes. In the SPARQL context, it can be equally useful. This problem has recently been investigated theoretically and some query containment solvers are available. Yet, there were no benchmarks to compare theses systems and foster their improvement. In order to experimentally assess implementation strengths and limitations, we provide a first SPARQL containment test benchmark. It has been designed with respect to both the capabilities of existing solvers and the study of typical queries. Some solvers support optional constructs and cycles, while other solvers support projection, union of conjunctive queries and RDF Schemas. No solver currently supports all these features or OWL entailment regimes. The study of query demographics on DBPedia logs shows that the vast majority of queries are acyclic and a significant part of them uses UNION or projection. We thus test available solvers on their domain of applicability on three different benchmark suites. These experiments show that (i) tested solutions are overall functionally correct, (ii) in spite of its complexity, SPARQL query containment is practicable for acyclic queries, (iii) state-of-the-art solvers are at an early stage both in ter
Towards Efficient Reasoning under Guarded-based Disjunctive Existential Rules
International audienceThe complete picture of the complexity of answering (unions of) conjunctive queries under the main guarded-based classes of disjunc- tive existential rules has been recently settled. It has been shown that the problem is very hard, namely 2ExpTime-complete, even for fixed sets of rules expressed in lightweight formalisms. This gives rise to the question whether its complexity can be reduced by restricting the query language. Several subclasses of conjunctive queries have been proposed with the aim of reducing the complexity of classical database problems such as query evaluation and query containment. Three of the most prominent subclasses of this kind are queries of bounded hypertree-width, queries of bounded treewidth and acyclic queries. The central objective of the present paper is to understand whether the above query languages have a positive impact on the complexity of query answering under the main guarded-based classes of disjunctive existential rules. We show that (unions of) conjunctive queries of bounded hypertree- width and of bounded treewidth do not reduce the complexity of our problem, even if we focus on predicates of bounded arity, or on fixed sets of disjunctive existential rules. Regarding acyclic queries, although our problem remains 2ExpTime-complete in general, in some relevant set- tings the complexity reduces to ExpTime-complete; in fact, this requires to bound the arity of the predicates, and for some expressive guarded- based formalisms, to fix the set of rules
An Analytical Study of Large SPARQL Query Logs
With the adoption of RDF as the data model for Linked Data and the Semantic
Web, query specification from end- users has become more and more common in
SPARQL end- points. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth analytical study of
the queries formulated by end-users and harvested from large and up-to-date
query logs from a wide variety of RDF data sources. As opposed to previous
studies, ours is the first assessment on a voluminous query corpus, span- ning
over several years and covering many representative SPARQL endpoints. Apart
from the syntactical structure of the queries, that exhibits already
interesting results on this generalized corpus, we drill deeper in the
structural char- acteristics related to the graph- and hypergraph represen-
tation of queries. We outline the most common shapes of queries when visually
displayed as pseudographs, and char- acterize their (hyper-)tree width.
Moreover, we analyze the evolution of queries over time, by introducing the
novel con- cept of a streak, i.e., a sequence of queries that appear as
subsequent modifications of a seed query. Our study offers several fresh
insights on the already rich query features of real SPARQL queries formulated
by real users, and brings us to draw a number of conclusions and pinpoint
future di- rections for SPARQL query evaluation, query optimization, tuning,
and benchmarking
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