An Executable Specification for SPARQL

Mihaela A. Bornea, Julian Dolby, Achille Fokoue, Anastasios Kementsietsidis, Kavitha Srinivas, Mandana Vaziri

Abstract: Linked Data on the web consists of over 1000 datasets from a variety of domains. They are queried with the SPARQL query language. There exist many implementations of SPARQL, and this rich ecosystem has demanded a precise specification and compliance tests. However, the SPARQL specification has grown in complexity, and it is increasingly difficult for developers to validate their implementations. In this paper, we present a declarative specification for SPARQL, based on relational logic. It describes SPARQL with just a few operators, and is executable: queries written in it can be directly executed against real datasets.