The W3C SPARQL Working Group has published two new drafts: the First Public Working Draft of SPARQL 1.1 Overview and the Last Call Working Draft of SPARQL 1.1 Federated Query.

SPARQL, a recursive acronym for SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language, is a specification developed and standardised by W3C. It is considered to be one of the key technologies of the semantic web and consists of two components:

  ?    The SPARQL Query Language for RDF allows querying RDF graphs via pattern matching, similar to how SQL works for relational databases.
  ?    The SPARQL Protocol for RDF defines a method for remote invocation of SPARQL queries.

As a whole, SPARQL defines a standard way in which to communicate with RDF-based services on the web, greatly improving the level of interoperability of the semantic web.

Since it became an official W3C Recommendation in 2008, W3C has continued to improve the specification, leading to the two newly published drafts. The First Public Working Draft of SPARQL 1.1 Overview provides an introduction to a set of specifications that facilitate querying and manipulating RDF graph content on the web or in an RDF store. The second draft is a Last Call Working Draft of SPARQL 1.1 Federated Query, which offers data consumers the opportunity to merge data distributed across the web from multiple SPARQL query services.

Comments on both drafts are welcome and can be sent to the public mailing lists of W3C mentioned in the drafts.