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W3C RDF Data Access Working Group

RDF Data Access Group is a working group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) started on February 2004. It aims at designing a query language for RDF documents. Such a language should do for RDF what SQL is for relational databases.

Official information on the group activities can be found at http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/DataAccess/ together with the group charter: http://www.w3.org/2003/12/swa/dawg-charter The mailing list archive is available at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-dawg/.

The 25 members of the group have already met five times and teleconferences are scheduled every week. Four documents have been produced so far:

RDF Data Access Use Cases and Requirements

This report, edited by Kendall Clark, compiles example RDF queries and the induced requirements of each use case on the design of the language.

http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-dawg-uc/

SPARQL Query Language for RDF

This document, edited by Eric Prud'hommeaux and Andy Seaborne, proposes a query language for RDF. An answer to a query is a set of variable bindings to termes of the RDF language. Such an answer is sound and complete with regard to some set of RDF graphs if the application of the binding to the query is a consequence of these graphs.

Additional mechanisms allow to constrain the values or to consider part of the query as optional.

http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/

SPARQL Protocol for RDF

This document, edited by Kendall Clark, proposes a protocol for conveying SPARQL queries to a SPARQL query processing service and for returning the results to the entity that requested them.

http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-protocol/

SPARQL Query Results XML Format

This document, edited by Dave Beckett, proposes an XML format for the variable bindings and boolean results that form the answers to a SPARQL query.

http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-XMLres/

EXMO and RDFDAG

Jean-François Baget is involved in the RDF Data Access Working Group for INRIA.

EXMO involvement in this working group is the result of our interest for graph based knowledge representation languages (such as conceptual graphs or RDF). This involvement is complementary of our participarion in work package 2.5 of the Knowledge web network of excellence which studies the extension of actual semantic web languages.

Meeting reports

• Foundation meeting at Mandelieu
• Leiden face-to-face