On the primitivity of operators in SPARQL

Abstract

The paper studies the primitivity of the basic operators UNION, AND, OPTIONAL, FILTER, and SELECT, as they are used in the SPARQL query language. The question of whether one operator can be expressed in terms of the other operators is answered in detail. It turns out that only AND is non-primitive. These results are shown to be insensitive to the choice of semantics for filter conditions (three-valued or two-valued). It is also shown that these two semantics can simulate each other.