dlvhex-sparql: A SPARQL-compliant query engine based on dlvhex

Abstract

This paper describes the dlvhex SPARQL plugin, a query processor for the upcoming Semantic Web query language standard by W3C. We report on the implementation of this languages using dlvhex, a flexible plugin system on top of the DLV solver. This work advances our earlier translation based on the semantics by Perez et al. towards an engine which is fully compliant to the official SPARQL specification. As it turns out, the differences between these two definitions of SPARQL, which might seem moderate at first glance, need some extra machinery. We also briefly report the status of implementation, and extensions currently being implemented, such as handling of aggregates, nested CONSTRUCT queries in the spirit of networked RDF graphs, or partially support of RDFS entailment. For such extensions a tight integration of SPARQL query processing and Answer-Set Programming, the underlying logic programming formalism of our engine, turns out to be particularly useful, as the resulting programs can actually involve unstratified negation.