Consistent Query Answering over SHACL Constraints

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the computational complexity of consistent query answering over SHACL constraints in RDF data, revealing intractability across various semantics and restrictions, with complexities spanning the polynomial hierarchy.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed complexity analysis of CQA for SHACL constraints in the context of SPARQL, identifying intractability results for multiple variants.

Findings

All variants of CQA over SHACL are intractable.

Complexity ranges between the first and third levels of the polynomial hierarchy.

The results highlight fundamental computational challenges in practical SHACL data validation.

Abstract

The Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL) was standardized by the World Wide Web as a constraint language to describe and validate RDF data graphs. SHACL uses the notion of shapes graph to describe a set of shape constraints paired with targets, that specify which nodes of the RDF graph should satisfy which shapes. An important question in practice is how to handle data graphs that do not validate the shapes graph. A solution is to tolerate the non-validation and find ways to obtain meaningful and correct answers to queries despite the non-validation. This is known as consistent query answering (CQA) and there is extensive literature on CQA in both the database and the KR setting. We study CQA in the context of SHACL for a fundamental fragment of the Semantic Web query language SPARQL. The goal of our work is a detailed complexity analysis of CQA for various semantics and possible restrictions on the acceptable repairs. It turns out that all considered variants of the problem are intractable, with complexities ranging between the first and third level of the polynomial hierarchy.