Introduction

This document provides an overview of the main new features of SPARQL and their rationale. This is an update to SPARQL adding several new features that have been agreed by the SPARQL WG. These language features were determined based on real applications and user and tool-developer experience.

The new features have been grouped into Required and Time-permitting features as follows.

• Required features
  • Aggregate functions
  • Subqueries
  • Negation
  • Project expressions
  • Update
  • Service description
• Time-permitting features
  • BGP extensions for entailment regimes (OWL flavors, RDFS, RIF)
  • Property paths
  • Commonly used SPARQL functions (e.g. string manipulation functions)
  • Basic federated query
  • Query language syntax (Commas in select lists, IN/BETWEEN operator)

Structure of this Document

In the remainder of this document we will present the new features according to the nomenclature agreed by the Working Group:

• SPARQL/Query 1.1: referring to the SPARQL Query Language
• SPARQL/Update 1.0: referring to the SPARQL Update Language

Each feature is described in a common pattern as follows:

Motivations

a brief sentence explaining why the new feature was added

Description

a more complete description of the feature

Existing implementation

a list of existing implementations for the proposed feature and example syntax used in the implementation

Related discussions

links to related discussions of the WG regarding the feature (mainly issues raised) and

Status

the status of the feature, i.e. either required or time-permitting.

This current working draft details only the required features.