Mapping-equivalence and oid-equivalence of single-function object-creating conjunctive queries
This work addresses foundational issues in database theory for applications like data exchange and integration, but it is incremental as it builds on prior equivalence notions and focuses on a restricted class of queries.
The paper tackles the problem of equivalence and logical entailment for single-function object-creating conjunctive queries (sifo CQs), providing a simpler characterization for oid-equivalence and showing that both problems belong to the complexity class NP.
Conjunctive database queries have been extended with a mechanism for object creation to capture important applications such as data exchange, data integration, and ontology-based data access. Object creation generates new object identifiers in the result, that do not belong to the set of constants in the source database. The new object identifiers can be also seen as Skolem terms. Hence, object-creating conjunctive queries can also be regarded as restricted second-order tuple-generating dependencies (SO tgds), considered in the data exchange literature. In this paper, we focus on the class of single-function object-creating conjunctive queries, or sifo CQs for short. We give a new characterization for oid-equivalence of sifo CQs that is simpler than the one given by Hull and Yoshikawa and places the problem in the complexity class NP. Our characterization is based on Cohen's equivalence notions for conjunctive queries with multiplicities. We also solve the logical entailment problem for sifo CQs, showing that also this problem belongs to NP. Results by Pichler et al. have shown that logical equivalence for more general classes of SO tgds is either undecidable or decidable with as yet unknown complexity upper bounds.