Transformations in areas (2024-02-10)

Query transformations are ubiquitous in semantic web query processing. For any situation in which transformations are not proved correct by construction, the quality of these transformations has to be evaluated. Usual evaluation measures are either overly syntactic and not very informative ---the result being: correct or incorrect--- or dependent from the evaluation sources. Moreover, both approaches do not necessarily yield the same result. We suggest that grounding the evaluation on query containment allows for a data-independent evaluation that is more informative than the usual syntactic evaluation. In addition, such evaluation modalities may take into account ontologies, alignments or different query languages as soon as they are relevant to query evaluation.

Query containment is defined as the problem of determining if the result of a query is included in the result of another query for any dataset. It has major applications in query optimization and knowledge base verification. The main objective of this work is to provide sound and complete procedures to determine containment of SPARQL queries under expressive description logic schema axioms. Beyond that, these procedures are experimentally evaluated. To date, testing query containment has been performed using different techniques: containment mapping, canonical databases, automata theory techniques and through a reduction to the validity problem in logic. In this work, we use the latter technique to test containment of SPARQL queries using an expressive modal logic called mu-calculus. For that purpose, we define an RDF graph encoding as a transition system which preserves its characteristics. In addition, queries and schema axioms are encoded as mu-calculus formulae. Thereby, query containment can be reduced to testing validity in the logic. We identify various fragments of SPARQL and description logic schema languages for which containment is decidable. Additionally, we provide theoretically and experimentally proven procedures to check containment of these decidable fragments. Finally, we propose a benchmark for containment solvers which is used to test and compare the current state-of-the-art containment solvers.