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Friday, September 28, 2007

W3C Candidate Recommendation: SPARQL Query Results XML Format

Members of the W3C RDF Data Access Working Group have announced the
advancement of the "SPARQL Query Results XML Format" specification to
Candidate Recommendation. W3C publishes a Candidate Recommendation to
gather implementation experience. The RDF Data Access Working Group has
already gathered implementation experience for this specification as
part of developing the "SPARQL Query" and "SPARQL Protocol"
specifications. Rather than request to advance directly to Proposed
Recommendation, the group has requested to use this Candidate
Recommendation period to identify additional implementations, such as
automated consumers of SPARQL XML Results, and to provide implementers
of SPARQL Query and SPARQL Protocol with a suitably stable specification.
The design has stabilized and the Working Group intends to advance this
specification to Proposed Recommendation once the exit criteria are met,
viz., when the SPARQL Query Results XML Format has at least two
implementations. The specification will remain a Candidate Recommendation
until at least 9-October-2007, and an implementation report will be
produced. The specification describes an XML format for the variable
binding and boolean results formats provided by the SPARQL query
language for RDF as part of the Semantic Web Activity. RDF is a flexible,
extensible way to represent information about World Wide Web resources.
It is used to represent, among other things, personal information, social
networks, metadata about digital artifacts like music and images, as
well as provide a means of integration over disparate sources of
information. A standardized query language for RDF data with multiple
implementations offers developers and end users a way to write and to
consume the results of queries across this wide range of information.
With the propoed format, SPARQL variable binding and boolean results can
be expressed in XML.

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