The W3C has announced that eleven specifications of SPARQL 1.1 have been published as recommendations. SPARQL is the Semantic Web query language.  We caught up with Lee Feigenbaum, VP Marketing & Technology at Cambridge Semantics Inc. to discuss the significance of this announcement. Feigenbaum is a SPARQL expert who currently serves as the Co-Chair of the W3C’s SPARQL Working Group, leading the design of SPARQL.

Feigenbaum says, “SPARQL 1.1 is a huge leap forward in providing a standard way to access and update Semantic Web data. By reaching W3C Recommendation status, Semantic Web developers, vendors, publishers and consumers have a stable, well-vetted, and interoperable set of standards they can rely on for the foreseeable future.”

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Ivan Herman reports, “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.” Read more

Kendall Clark recently discussed what users can expect from Stardog next. Clark wrote, “The most pressing need in Stardog is support for SPARQL 1.1. We got stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea—trying to push the 1.0 release before the SPARQL Working Group was completely finished with the SPARQL 1.1 spec. We were motivated to avoid reimplementing any parts of SPARQL 1.1 because the spec shifted. So we decided SPARQL 1.10 for the Stardog 1.0 release. Then we told everyone that SPARQL 1.1 would be the highest priority item for the post-1.0 release cycle. And so it’s been.” Read more

Courtesy: Flickr/prusakolep

What’s on the horizon for the semantic web? It was a question pondered by expert panelists last week at the Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco.

Siri – and its possible clones and descendents – came up as a signpost on the road ahead, pushing the notion of personal assistance ever forward.  “Siri made a huge splash. It opened eyes to the idea of not just using semantics to move information around but using a natural language system with some semantic interpretation to perform actions, like putting reminders on your phone,” noted Mark Greaves, director of knowledge systems at Vulcan.

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This year was the 21st World Wide Web Conference located in Lyon, France. This conference is a unique forum for discussion about how the Web is evolving. There were hundreds of talks over 3 days. Let me summarize some Semantic Web presentations I was able to attend.

NautiLOD

Programmers daily use the wget tool to specify and retrieve data on the Web. However, wget is limited since it cannot dig into the semantics of Web data to do the job. What if you were to add semantics to wget? This is the question that Valeria Fionda, Claudio Gutierrez and Giuseppe Pirró asked themselves. They took that question to the next level: imagine a semantic wget on top of Linked Data. They wanted to create a language to declaratively specify portions of the Web of Data, define routes and instruct agents that can do things for you on the Web. All this by exploiting the semantics of information (RDF data) found in online data sources. For example, find all the Wikipedia pages of directors that have been influenced by Stanley Kubrick and send them to my email; retrieving information about David Lynch from different information providers only gives a hint of what can be done. The researchers developed a simple, generic declarative language, NautiLOD and implemented it in swget (semantic wget). swget comes in two flavors: a simple command line tool (to give the Web back to users) and a GUI. This is not a fantasy anymore. Check it our for yourself (http://swget.wordpress.com).

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The W3C’s SPARQL Working Group has published a second round of last call working drafts for five SPARQL 1.1 documents. The documents include SPARQL 1.1 Update, SPARQL 1.1 Service Description, SPARQL 1.1 Query Language, SPARQL 1.1 Protocol, and SPARQL 1.1 Entailment Regimes. Comments are welcome on each of the five documents through February 6, 2012. Read more

The W3C reports that “The SPARQL Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of SPARQL 1.1 Query Results JSON Format. This was also the First Public Draft of that document. This document describes the representation of SELECT and ASK query results using JSON. Comments are welcome through 26 October.” The project page notes, “Publication as a Last Call Working Draft indicates that the SPARQL Working Group believes it has addressed all substantive issues and that the document is stable. The Working Group expects to advance this specification to Recommendation Status.” Read more

SPARQL is the standardized query language for RDF, the same way SQL is the standardized query language for relational databases. If this is the first time you look at SPARQL, but you’re familiar with SQL, you will see some similarities because it shares several keywords such as SELECT, WHERE, etc. It also has new keywords that you have never seen if you come from a SQL world such as OPTIONAL, FILTER and much more.

Recall that RDF is a triple comprised of a subject, predicate and object. A SPARQL query consists of a set of triples where the subject, predicate and/or object can consist of variables. The idea is to match the triples in the SPARQL query with the existing RDF triples and find solutions to the variables. A SPARQL query is executed on a RDF dataset, which can be a native RDF database, or on a Relational Database to RDF (RDB2RDF) system, such as Ultrawrap.  These databases have SPARQL endpoints which accept queries and return results via HTTP.

A basic example

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If you missed last week’s excellent introduction to SPARQL by Bob DuCharme of TopQuadrant and the recently released Learning SPARQL, the recorded webcast is now available.  In this presentation, Bob shows how to create and run SPARQL queries. He also talks about the role that the query language can play in application development. Lastly, he looks at the range of uses people are finding for SPARQL above and beyond querying of RDF data, such as querying relational data, defining rules to enhance data quality, and more…

Watch the webcast here:

http://mediabistro.adobeconnect.com/p8mwns7kdgx/

There were some questions we did not get to during the hour, and Bob has been kind enough to answer these offline.

BONUS Q&A with Bob DuCharme:

Q: Can sparql engines integrate reasoners and reason over the data on the fly? Read more

Date:	Thursday, August 25, 2011
Time:	2:00pm ET / 11:00am PT
Cost:	FREE
[NOTE: The first block of tickets for this webcast sold out within 24 hours. A new block is now available, but going fast! Additionally, the webcast will be recorded and archived here at SemanticWeb.com]

Description:
Semantic web and linked data technologies are built around a simple data model that makes it easy to share and combine data from disparate sources across the public internet or across silos on a private intranet. SPARQL is the query language standard from the W3C (the same standards body that brought us HTML, CSS, and XML) for querying this data. A variety of free and commercial software implementations have made it easy for people to get started with SPARQL and to incorporate it into applications that take advantage of the growing availability of linked data on the web.
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