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