Querying knowledge graphs with extended property paths

The increasing number of Knowledge Graphs (KGs) available today calls for powerful query languages that can strike a balance between expressiveness and complexity of query evaluation, and that can be easily integrated into existing query processing infrastructures. We present Extended Property Paths (EPPs), a significant enhancement of Property Paths (PPs), the navigational core included in the SPARQL query language. We introduce the EPPs syntax, which allows to capture in a succinct way a larger class of navigational queries than PPs and other navigational extensions of SPARQL, and provide formal semantics. We describe a translation from non-recursive EPPs (nEPPs) into SPARQL queries and provide novel expressiveness results about the capability of SPARQL sub-languages to express navigational queries. We prove that the language of EPPs is more expressive than that of PPs; using EPPs within SPARQL allows to express things that cannot be expressed when only using PPs. We also study the expressiveness of SPARQL with EPPs in terms of reasoning capabilities. We show that SPARQL with EPPs is expressive enough to capture the main RDFS reasoning functionalities and describe how a query can be rewritten into another query enhanced with reasoning capabilities. We complement our contributions with an implementation of EPPs as the SPARQL-independent iEPPs language and an implementation of the translation of nEPPs into SPARQL queries. What sets our approach apart from previous research on querying KGs is the possibility to evaluate both nEPPs and SPARQL with nEPPs queries under the RDFS entailment regime on existing query processors. We report on an experimental evaluation on a variety of real KGs.