Eleven SPARQL 1.1 Specifications Published

The W3C SPARQL Working Group has published today a set of eleven documents, advancing most of SPARQL 1.1 to Proposed Recommendation. Building on the success of SPARQL 1.0, SPARQL 1.1 is a full-featured standard system for working with RDF data, including a query/update language, two HTTP protocols (one full-featured, one using basic HTTP verbs), three result formats, and other features which allow SPARQL endpoints to be combined and work together. Most features of SPARQL 1.1 have already been implemented by a range of SPARQL suppliers, as shown in our table of implementations and test results.

The Proposed Recommendations are:

1. SPARQL 1.1 Overview - Overview of SPARQL 1.1 and the SPARQL 1.1 documents
2. SPARQL 1.1 Query Language - A query language for RDF data.
3. SPARQL 1.1 Update - Specifies additions to the query language to allow clients to update stored data
4. SPARQL 1.1 Query Results JSON Format - How to use JSON for SPARQL query results
5. SPARQL 1.1 Query Results CSV and TSV Formats - How to use comma-separated values (CVS) and tab-separated values (TSV) for SPARQL query results
6. SPARQL Query Results XML Format - How to use XML for SPARQL query results. (This contains only minor, editorial updates from SPARQL 1.0, and is actually a Proposed Edited Recommendation.)
7. SPARQL 1.1 Federated Query - an extension of the SPARQL 1.1 Query Language for executing queries distributed over different SPARQL endpoints.
8. SPARQL 1.1 Service Description - a method for discovering and a vocabulary for describing SPARQL services.

The following are Candidate Recommendations, as the group still seeks more feedback from implementors:

1. SPARQL 1.1 Entailment Regimes - defines the semantics of SPARQL queries under entailment regimes such as RDF Schema, OWL, or RIF.
2. SPARQL 1.1 Protocol for RDF - A protocol defining means for conveying arbitrary SPARQL queries and update requests to a SPARQL service.
3. SPARQL 1.1 Graph Store HTTP Protocol - As opposed to the full SPARQL protocol, this specification defines minimal means for managing RDF graph content directly via common HTTP operations.

The group has also produced a test suite and a page on using SPARQL 1.1 with RDF 1.1.