Optimising SPARQL Query Evaluation in the Presence of ShEx Constraints

ShEx (Shape Expressions) is a language for expressing constraints on RDF graphs. In this work, we optimise the evaluation of conjunctive SPARQL queries, on RDF graphs, by taking advantage of ShEx constraints. Our optimisation is based on computing and assigning ranks to query triple patterns, dictating their order of execution. We first define a set of well-formed ShEx schemas, that possess interesting characteristics for SPARQL query optimisation. We then define our optimisation method by exploiting information extracted from a ShEx schema. We finally report on evaluation results performed showing the advantages of applying our optimisation on the top of an existing state-of-the-art query evaluation system.