The W3C RDF Data Access Working Group (DAWG) has just published a new version of the work on RDF Query, SPARQL Query Language for RDF draft of 19 April 2005. This one has a big core syntax change to move from the tuple style:

(a b c)
(d e f)

to the Turtle/N3 style:

{ a b c .
  d e f }

and allow the same triple abbreviations as Turtle does. It makes the data and query work similar and easier to use “data as query” style approaches.

There’s also a new query results sorting syntax added allowing ORDER BY operating on variables, expressions as well as other changes and document improvements.

This is what we (me with Eric, Andy and Steve) will be presenting at the Introduction to RDF Query with SPARQL tutorial at the WWW2005 conference in Japan next month. Sign up if you want to get the latest direct from the query spec editors (Eric and Andy) :)

I’ve been having trouble keeping up with SPARQL drafts with Rasqal and only have recently (last few days) got the various tests to the not crashing, some things work level of support for the new syntax. I’m hoping to move to somewhat working state soonish but there are more query engine changes I know I need to make, more sure to do, and it’s slow work.

I gave up waiting for SourceForge to restore access to all it’s compile farm hosts, and tested with what I could. It looked ok so I announced the release of Rasqal 0.9.8 (release notes) which updates the syntax to the SPARQL Query Language for RDF, W3C Working Draft, 17 February 2005. and has a lot of internal changes to match what’ll be needed to do the rest of SPARQL (I think!). This is playing catchup a bit as SPARQL syntax has changed since the WD, but making a release match a particular WD makes it clear relationship. I can now go break things, yay!