Mapping between RDF and XML with XSPARQL

Abstract

One promise of Semantic Web applications is to seamlessly deal with heterogeneous data. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) has become widely adopted as an almost ubiquitous interchange format for data, along with transformation languages like XSLT and XQuery to translate data from one XML format into another. However, the more recent Resource Description Framework (RDF) has become another popular standard for data representation and exchange, supported by its own query language SPARQL, that enables extraction and transformation of RDF data. Being able to work with XML and RDF using a common framework eliminates several unnecessary steps that are currently required when handling both formats side by side. In this paper we present the XSPARQL language that, by combining XQuery and SPARQL, allows to query XML and RDF data using the same framework and transform data from one format into the other. We focus on the semantics of this combined language and present an implementation, including discussion of query optimisations along with benchmark evaluation.