XSPARQL Submission

Submitted Materials

We, W3C Member(s) Asemantics S.R.L., DERI Galway at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland, Fundación CTIC (Centro Tecnológico para el Desarrollo en Asturias de las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación), Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA), Ontotext, OpenLink Software Inc., Profium, Talis Information Limited, and University of Innsbruck hereby submit to the Consortium the following specification, comprising the following document(s) attached hereto:

which collectively are referred to as "the Submission". We request the Submission be known as the XSPARQL Submission.

Change Control

Revision and change control of the Submission shall remain with the Submitters until such time as a suitable W3C group is formed.

Abstract

With currently available tools and languages, translating between an existing XML format and RDF is a tedious and error-prone task. The importance of this problem is acknowledged by the W3C GRDDL working group who faces the issue of extracting RDF data out of existing HTML or XML files, as well as by the Web service community around SAWSDL, who need to perform lowering and lifting between RDF data from a semantic client and XML messages for a Web service. However, at the moment, both these groups rely solely on XSLT transformations between RDF/XML and the respective other XML format at hand. We propose a more natural approach for such transformations based on merging XQuery and SPARQL into the novel language XSPARQL.

Recently, two new languages have entered the stage for processing XML and RDF data: XQuery is a W3C Recommendation since early last year and SPARQL has finally received W3C's Recommendation stamp in January 2008. While both languages operate in their own worlds - SPARQL in the RDF- and XQuery in the XML-world - we show in this specification that the merge of both in the novel language XSPARQL has the potential to finally bring XML and RDF closer together. XSPARQL provides concise and intuitive solutions for mapping between XML and RDF in either direction, addressing both the use cases of GRDDL and SAWSDL. As a side effect, XSPARQL may also be used for RDF to RDF transformations beyond the capabilities of "pure" SPARQL. We also describe an implementation of XSPARQL, available for user evaluation.

While XSPARQL is not intended to replace XQuery or to define a general approach to XQuery extensibility, XSPARQL use cases can serve as use cases for such an extensibility mechanism.

Intellectual Property Statements

The statements below concerning Copyrights, Trade and Service Marks, and Patents, have been made by the following people on behalf of their affiliated organisations:

Copyrights

Each organisation, respectively, hereby grants to the W3C a perpetual, nonexclusive, royalty-free, world-wide right and license under any of its copyrights on this contribution, to copy, publish and distribute the contribution under the W3C document licenses.

Additionally, should the Submission be used as a contribution towards a W3C Activity, each of these organisations grants a right and license of the same scope to any derivative works prepared by the W3C and based on, or incorporating all or part of, the contribution. Each of these organisations further agrees that any derivative works of this contribution prepared by the W3C shall be solely owned by the W3C.

Trade and Service Marks

The Submission request or Submission does not refer to any trade and service marks (registered or not) required to implement the language. There are several examples that may refer to trade and service marks; however, these examples are informative only.

Patents

Asemantics S.R.L., DERI Galway at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland, Fundación CTIC (Centro Tecnológico para el Desarrollo en Asturias de las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación), Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA), Ontotext, OpenLink Software Inc., Profium, Talis Information Limited, University of Innsbruck, and individual co-authors all agree to offer licenses according to the W3C Royalty-Free licensing requirements described in section 5 of the 5 February 2004 W3C Patent Policy for any portion of the Submission that is subsequently incorporated in a W3C Recommendation.

Additionally, all co-authors claim to have no personal knowledge of any IPR claims held by their respective organisations regarding XSPARQL.

Required proprietary technology

No proprietary technology is required to implement the specifications contained in this submission.

Suggested action

We suggest the Consortium publish this as a Member Submission and take it into account for appropriate standardisation activities. In particular, we see this submission as input for liaisons between the XML Query Working Group, which is part of the XML Activity and the Data Access Working Group, which is part of the Semantic Web Activity.

Resources

To help with this work each submitting organisation expects, but does not commit, to be able to provide customary resources (Working Group participants, editors and chairs) according to each submitting organisation's ability.

Contact

Inquiries from the public or press about this Submission should be directed to: Axel Polleres or Nuno Lopes from DERI Galway at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland (axel.polleres@deri.org, nuno.lopes@deri.org).

Submitted

this 20th day of January, 2009,

Davide Palmisano, Asemantics S.R.L.

Axel Polleres, DERI Galway at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

Carlos de la Fuente, Fundación CTIC (Centro Tecnológico para el Desarrollo en Asturias de las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación)

Vincent Quint, Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA)

Atanas Kiryakov, Ontotext

Kingsley Idehen, OpenLink Software Inc.

Janne Saarela, Profium

Ian Davis, Talis Information Limited

Michal Zaremba, University of Innsbruck

