The Problem of Correlation and Substitution in SPARQL - Extended Version.

Implementations of a standard language are expected to give same outputs to identical queries. In this paper we study why different implementations of SPARQL (Fuseki, Virtuoso, Blazegraph and rdf4j) behave differently when evaluating queries with correlated variables. We show that at the core of this problem lies the historically troubling notion of logical substitution. We present a formal framework to study this issue based on Datalog that besides clarifying the problem, gives a solid base to define and implement nesting.