The SPARQL Query Language for RDF W3C Working Draft 2005-02-17 was just published by the RDF Data Access Working Group (DAWG). Lots of work went into this 2nd WD especially by the editors – congratulations. So what’s changed? Various things around syntax and some more core bits of the design were decided after our recent DAWG meeting in Helsinki. The dataset you query against now uses WITH instead of LOAD, SOURCE is now GRAPH in querying. The testing values section has several new RDF-specific builtins BOUND(), ISURI(), ISBLANK(), ISLITERAL(), STR(), LANG(), DATATYPE() and also describes the imported types and operations from XML Query Functions and Operators on string, double, float, decimal, integer and dateTime. There are of course, many other changes.

I’m not an editor so just cheered from the sidelines and did a little updating of my Rasqal RDF query demo to catch up with earlier work (using Redland’s Perl binding). It now does ASK and CONSTRUCT query results, can give you RDF/XML, XML variable bindings syntax results and I also added the SPARQL special builtins listed above.