Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

And now we have SPARQL. The semantic web query language this week became official with three SPARQL recommendations, thus helping to round out the core technologies that are needed for realizing the vision of the semantic web. (SPARQL is short for Simple Protocol and RDF Query Language.)

The other technologies are the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which provides a standard for making statements about resources in the form of a subject-predicate-object expression; the Web Ontology Language (OWL) for building vocabularies; and the Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialect of Languages (GRDDL) for automatically extracting data from semantic documents. The latter became a W3C recommendation in September.

With the publication of SPARQL, the stage is set for wider adoption of semantic web standards.

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“Trying to use the semantic web without SPARQL is like trying to use a relational database without SQL,” said Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director, in a statement announcing the news. “SPARQL makes it possible to query information from databases and other diverse sources in the wild, across the web.”

The three SPARQL Recommendations introduced by the W3C RDF Data Access Working Group are:

SPARQL Query Language for RDF, which is designed to meet the use cases and requirements identified by the RDF Data Access Working Group in its RDF data access use cases and requirements. These use cases, which according to the W3C describe a user-oriented context in which the RDF query language or protocol or both are used to solve a real problem, make for some interesting reading for anyone who wants to understand practical implications of the semantic web in the real world. On the W3C page devoted to this topic, you can read how, for example, you could have your Bluetooth-equipped car query public RDF storage servers on the Web for a description of current road construction projects, traffic jams, and roads affected by inclement weather.

In combination with a mapping program in your cell phone, the data retrieved from the servers could be used to plan a different route to work and cut your commute time. At a business level, there are supply chain management applications, outlined by the example of a motorcycle dealer that could query its parts database to ask about a defective part and receive back a human-readable description of the part, which provides enough information to obtain a replacement part but also tells her about other, dependent parts that must be replaced at the same time.

SPARQL Protocol for RDF, which the W3C says uses WSDL 2.0 to describe a means for conveying SPARQL queries to an SPARQL query processing service and returning the query results to the entity that requested them.

SPARQL Query Results XML Format, for the variable binding and boolean results formats provided by the SPARQL query language for RDF.

There are already 14 known implementations of SPARQL, according to the W3C. Many of them are open source.

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