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SPARQL

  • Reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

  • 180 Accesses

Synonyms

SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language; RDF query language

Scientific Fundamentals

Semantic Web, Query Language

Definition

SPARQL (a recursive acronym for SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language), proposed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is a structured query language that retrieves and manipulates data stored in RDF (Resource Description Framework) format. SPARQL can be used to express queries across diverse data sources, whether the data is stored natively as RDF or viewed as RDF via middleware. The results of SPARQL queries can be result sets or RDF graphs.

Historical Background

SPARQL 1.0 became an official W3C Recommendation on 15 January 2008. On 26 March 2013, the SPARQL Working Group has produced a new W3C Recommendation SPARQL 1.1 that introduces more features to 2008 version. SPARQL is emerging as the de facto RDF query language. Prior to SPARQL, there were some other popular RDF query languages, such as RQL, SeRQL, TRIPLE, RDQL, and so on. The comprehensive...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computer Science and Technology, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Lei Zou

Authors
  1. Lei Zou
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lei Zou .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

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Zou, L. (2018). SPARQL. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_80803

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