Learn what's new in RDF 1.2 and SPARQL 1.2!
The RDF 1.1 and SPARQL 1.1 specifications are foundational to Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Web research. More than a decade after their last versions were released as W3C recommendations, they are scheduled to receive an update to version 1.2. For the last 3 years, the RDF & SPARQL Working Group (formerly RDF-star Working Graph) has been working on these updates, with as primary focus the ability to make statements about other statements.
The goal of this tutorial is to provide a crash course into RDF 1.2 and SPARQL 1.2, for people that already know RDF 1.1 and SPARQL 1.1. We will discuss the history and motivations for this update, explain the new triple terms and reification concepts, and give an overview of the other changes that were included in the relevant specifications.
As outcomes, participants will understand the motivations for these new features, and they will be able to make use of them in their future work.
How to participate
This tutorial is open to all attendants to the ISWC 2025 conference. All materials will be made public afterwards.
We follow a lecture format, so no hardware or other materials are required from participants.
Participants are assumed to have basic RDF 1.1 and SPARQL 1.1 knowledge.
Program
| Duration | Topic |
|---|---|
| 10 min | 👋 Introduction and overview |
| 15 min | ⏳ History and motivation (of the working group) |
| 60 min | 🪆 Foundations of triple terms and reification |
| Triples and triple terms | |
| Reification of triple terms | |
| Typical use cases | |
| Syntax and semantics | |
| Illustrating examples | |
| Relation to RDF 1.1 reification: RDF full/classic | |
| Relation to Labelled Property Graphs | |
| Relation to UML and Entity-Relationship modelling | |
| Relation to Description Logics | |
| Difference to RDF-star | |
| 15 min | ❓ Discussion and questions |
| ☕️ Break | |
| 30 min | ⚙️ Triple terms and reification in SPARQL |
| Syntax | |
| Functions on triple terms | |
| 30 min | 🍇 Overview of smaller additions and changes |
| Base directions | |
| Removal of plain and simple literals concepts from SPARQL | |
| Notable errata in RDF and SPARQL | |
| 40 min | ❓ Discussion and questions |
Organization
This tutorial will be presented by the following members of the RDF & SPARQL Working Group (formerly known as the RDF-Star Working Group):
- Ruben Taelman, IDLab, Ghent University – imec, Ghent, Belgium
- Enrico Franconi, KRDB research centre for Knowledge-based Artificial Intelligence, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
- Pierre-Antoine Champin, W3C / Inria, France
- Ora Lassila, Amazon Web Services, USA