Similarity and bisimilarity notions appropriate for characterizing indistinguishability in fragments of the calculus of relations

Motivated by applications in databases, this paper considers various fragments of the calculus of binary relations. The fragments are obtained by leaving out, or keeping in, some of the standard operators, along with some derived operators such as set difference, projection, coprojection, and residuation. For each considered fragment, a characterization is obtained for when two given binary relational structures are indistinguishable by expressions in that fragment. The characterizations are based on appropriately adapted notions of simulation and bisimulation.Comment: 36 pages, Journal of Logic and Computation 201

Relative Expressive Power of Navigational Querying on Graphs

Motivated by both established and new applications, we study navigational query languages for graphs (binary relations). The simplest language has only the two operators union and composition, together with the identity relation. We make more powerful languages by adding any of the following operators: intersection; set difference; projection; coprojection; converse; and the diversity relation. All these operators map binary relations to binary relations. We compare the expressive power of all resulting languages. We do this not only for general path queries (queries where the result may be any binary relation) but also for boolean or yes/no queries (expressed by the nonemptiness of an expression). For both cases, we present the complete Hasse diagram of relative expressiveness. In particular the Hasse diagram for boolean queries contains some nontrivial separations and a few surprising collapses.Comment: An extended abstract announcing the results of this paper was presented at the 14th International Conference on Database Theory, Uppsala, Sweden, March 201

The impact of transitive closure on the expressiveness of navigational query languages on unlabeled graphs

Several established and novel applications motivate us to study the expressive power of navigational query languages on graphs, which represent binary relations. Our basic language has only the operators union and composition, together with the identity relation. Richer languages can be obtained by adding other features such as other set operators, projection and coprojection, converse, and the diversity relation. In this paper, we show that, when evaluated at the level of boolean queries with an unlabeled input graph (i.e. a single relation), adding transitive closure to the languages with coprojection adds expressive power, while this is not the case for the basic language to which none, one, or both of projection and the diversity relation are added. In combination with earlier work, these results yield a complete understanding of the impact of transitive closure on the languages under consideration.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Relative Expressive Power of Navigational Querying on Graphs using Transitive Closure

Motivated by both established and new applications, we study navigational query languages for graphs (binary relations). The simplest language has only the two operators union and composition, together with the identity relation. We make more powerful languages by adding any of thefollowing operators: intersection; set difference; projection; coprojection; converse; transitive closure; and the diversity relation. All these operators map binary relations to binary relations. We compare the expressive power of all resulting languages, both for binary-relation queries as well as for boolean queries. In the absence of transitive closure, a complete Hasse diagram of relative expressiveness has already been established [8]. Moreover, it has already been shown that for boolean queries over a single edge label, transitive closure does not add any expressive power when only projection and diversity may be present [11]. In the present paper, we now complete the Hasse diagram in the presence of transitive closure, both for the case of a single edge label, as well as for the case of at least two edge labels. The main technical results are the following:1. In contrast to the above-stated result [11] transitive closure does add expressive power when coprojection is present.2. Transitive closure also adds expressive power as soon as converse is present.3. Conversely, converse adds expressive power in the presence of transitive closure. In particular, the converse elimination result from [8] no longer works in the presence of transitive closure.4. As a corollary, we show that the converse elimination result from [8] necessitates an exponential blow-up in the degree of the expressions.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe