The “XSPARQL” specification has been published as a W3C member submission, co-authored by experts of Asemantics S.R.L., DERI Galway, Fundación CTIC, INRIA, Ontotext, OpenLink Software Inc., Profium, Talis Information Ltd., and the University of Innsbruck. This specification defines a merge of SPARQL and XQuery, and has the potential to bring XML and RDF closer together. XSPARQL provides concise and intuitive solutions for mapping between XML and RDF in either direction, addressing both the use cases of GRDDL and SAWSDL.
About Ivan Herman
Ivan Herman is the Semantic Web Activity Lead at W3C. He graduated as a mathematician at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, Hungary, in 1979. After a brief scholarship at the Université Paris VI he joined the Hungarian research institute in computer science (SZTAKI) where he worked for 6 years. He left Hungary in 1986 and, after a few years in industry, he joined the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Sciences (CWI) in Amsterdam where he has held a tenure position since 1988. He received a PhD degree in Computer Science in 1990 at the Leiden University, in the Netherlands. Ivan joined the W3C team as Head of Offices in January 2001 while maintaining his position at CWI. He served as Head of Offices until June 2006, when he was asked to take the Semantic Web Activity Lead position.
