Provenance for Regular Path Queries

Regular path queries (RPQs) the ubiquitous mechanism for querying data graphs of partially known structure. RPQs are in essence regular expressions over the edge symbols. The answer to an RPQ on a given graph (database) is the set of pairs of objects, which are connected by paths spelling words in the language of the regular path query. Often the database edges come with a weights assoaciated to them. Such weights can distances, levels of discomfort, multiplicities, etc. We model weights using semiring frameworks.