The SPARQL Working Group has completed development of its full-featured system for querying and managing data using the flexible RDF data model. It has now published eleven Recommendations for SPARQL 1.1, detailed in SPARQL 1.1 Overview. SPARQL 1.1 extends the 2008 Recommendation for SPARQL 1.0 by adding features to the query language such as aggregates, subqueries, negation, property paths, and an expanded set of functions and operators. Beyond the query language, SPARQL 1.1 adds other features that were widely requested, including update, service description, a JSON results format, and support for entailment reasoning.
About Ivan Herman
Ivan Herman is the Semantic Web Activity Lead at W3C. He graduated as a mathematician at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, Hungary, in 1979. After a brief scholarship at the Université Paris VI he joined the Hungarian research institute in computer science (SZTAKI) where he worked for 6 years. He left Hungary in 1986 and, after a few years in industry, he joined the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Sciences (CWI) in Amsterdam where he has held a tenure position since 1988. He received a PhD degree in Computer Science in 1990 at the Leiden University, in the Netherlands. Ivan joined the W3C team as Head of Offices in January 2001 while maintaining his position at CWI. He served as Head of Offices until June 2006, when he was asked to take the Semantic Web Activity Lead position.