Conjunctive Regular Path Queries under Injective Semantics

Abstract: We introduce injective semantics for Conjunctive Regular Path Queries (CRPQs), and study their fundamental properties. We identify two such semantics: atom-injective and query-injective semantics, both defined in terms of injective homomorphisms. These semantics are natural generalizations of the well-studied class of RPQs under simple-path semantics to the class of CRPQs. We study their evaluation and containment problems, providing useful characterizations for them, and we pinpoint the complexities of these problems. Perhaps surprisingly, we show that containment for CRPQs becomes undecidable for atom-injective semantics, and PSPACE-complete for query-injective semantics, in contrast to the known EXPSPACE-completeness result for the standard semantics. The techniques used differ significantly from the ones known for the standard semantics, and new tools tailored to injective semantics are needed. We complete the picture of complexity by investigating, for each semantics, the containment problem for the main subclasses of CRPQs, namely Conjunctive Queries and CRPQs with finite languages.