SPARQL (pronounced "sparkle", a recursive acronym for SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) is an RDF query language, that is, a query language for databases, able to retrieve and manipulate data stored in Resource Description Framework format.[2][3] It was made a standard by the RDF Data Access Working Group (DAWG) of the World Wide Web Consortium, and is recognized as one of the key technologies of the semantic web. On 15 January 2008, SPARQL 1.0 became an official W3C Recommendation,[4][5] and SPARQL 1.1 in March, 2013.[6]
SPARQL allows for a query to consist of triple patterns, conjunctions, disjunctions, and optional patterns.[7]
Implementations for multiple programming languages exist.[8] "SPARQL will make a huge difference" making the web machine-readable according to Sir Tim Berners-Lee in a May 2006 interview.[9]
There exist tools that allow one to connect and semi-automatically construct a SPARQL query for a SPARQL endpoint, for example ViziQuer.[10] In addition, there exist tools that translate SPARQL queries to other query languages, for example to SQL[11] and to XQuery.[12] SPARQL City's SPARQLverse also allows queries directly against non-SPARQL databases such as MongoDB and Cassandra, representing their data as though it is RDF.