Abstract
We study the expressiveness and complexity of Shape Expression Schema (ShEx), a novel schema formalism for RDF currently under development by W3C. A ShEx assigns types to the nodes of an RDF graph and allows to constrain the admissible neighborhoods of nodes of a given type with regular bag expressions (RBEs). We formalize and investigate two alternative semantics, multi- and single-type, depending on whether or not a node may have more than one type. We study the expressive power of ShEx and study the complexity of the validation problem. We show that the single-type semantics is strictly more expressive than the multi-type semantics, single-type validation is generally intractable and multi-type validation is feasible for a small (yet practical) subclass of RBEs. To curb the high computational complexity of validation, we propose a natural notion of determinism and show that multi-type validation for the class of deterministic schemas using single-occurrence regular bag expressions (SORBEs) is tractable.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | 18th International Conference on Database Theory, ICDT 2015, March 23-27, 2015, Brussels, Belgium |
Pages | 195-211 |
Number of pages | 17 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2015 |