Eleven SPARQL 1.1 Specifications Published
08 November 2012
| Archive
The SPARQL Working Group has today published a set of eleven documents, advancing most of SPARQL 1.1 to Proposed Recommendation. Building on the success of SPARQL 1.0, SPARQL 1.1 is a full-featured standard system for working with RDF data, including a query/update language, two HTTP protocols (one full-featured, one using basic HTTP verbs), three result formats, and other features which allow SPARQL endpoints to be combined and work together. Most features of SPARQL 1.1 have already been implemented by a range of SPARQL suppliers, as shown in our table of implementations and test results.
The Proposed Recommendations are:
- SPARQL 1.1 Overview - Overview of SPARQL
1.1 and the SPARQL 1.1 documents
- SPARQL 1.1 Query Language - A query language
for RDF data.
- SPARQL 1.1 Update - Specifies additions to the query language to allow clients to update stored data
- SPARQL 1.1 Query Results JSON Format - How to use JSON for SPARQL query results
- SPARQL 1.1 Query Results CSV and TSV Formats - How to use comma-separated values (CVS) and tab-separated values (TSV) for SPARQL query results
- SPARQL Query Results XML Format - How to use XML for SPARQL query results. (This contains only minor, editorial updates from SPARQL 1.0, and is actually a Proposed Edited Recommendation.)
- SPARQL 1.1 Federated Query - an extension of the SPARQL 1.1 Query Language for
executing queries distributed over different SPARQL
endpoints.
- SPARQL 1.1 Service Description - a method for discovering and a vocabulary for
describing SPARQL services.
The following are Candidate Recommendations, as the group still seeks more feedback from implementors:
- SPARQL 1.1 Entailment Regimes - defines the semantics of SPARQL queries under entailment
regimes such as RDF Schema, OWL, or RIF.
- SPARQL 1.1 Protocol for RDF - A protocol
defining means for conveying arbitrary SPARQL queries and
update requests to a SPARQL service.
- SPARQL 1.1 Graph Store HTTP Protocol - As
opposed to the full SPARQL protocol, this specification defines
minimal means for managing RDF graph content directly via
common HTTP operations.
The group has also produced a test suite and a page on using SPARQL 1.1 with RDF 1.1. Learn more about the Semantic Web.
CSS Writing Modes Module Level 3, CSS Masking Drafts Published
15 November 2012
| Archive
The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Working Draft of CSS Writing Modes Module Level 3. CSS Writing Modes Level 3 defines CSS support for various international writing modes, such as left-to-right (e.g. Latin or Indic), right-to-left (e.g. Hebrew or Arabic), bidirectional (e.g. mixed Latin and Arabic) and vertical (e.g. Asian scripts).
The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group and the SVG Working Group have published the First Public Working Draft of CSS Masking. CSS Masking provides two means for partially or fully hiding portions of visual elements: masking and clipping. Masking describes how to use another graphical element or image as a luminance or alpha mask. Typically, rendering an element via CSS or SVG can conceptually described as if the element, including its children, are drawn into a buffer and then that buffer is composited into the element's parent. Luminance and alpha masks influence the transparency of this buffer before the compositing stage. Clipping describes the visible region of visual elements. The region can be described by using certain SVG graphics elements or basic shapes. Anything outside of this region is not rendered.
Learn more about the Style Activity, and the Graphics Activity.
