The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks public comment on the candidate OGC “GeoSPARQL: A Geographic Query Language for RDF Data” Standard. The candidate OGC GeoSPARQL standard defines spatial extensions to the W3C's SPARQL protocol and RDF query language.

SPARQL is a protocol and query language for the Semantic Web. SPARQL is defined in terms of the W3C's RDF data model and will work for any data source that can be mapped into RDF, which potentially includes sources of geospatial data. The OGC GeoSPARQL standard supports representing and querying geospatial data on the Semantic Web, and it provides the foundational geospatial vocabulary for linked data involving location. GeoSPARQL defines a vocabulary for representing geospatial data in RDF, and it defines an extension to SPARQL for processing geospatial data. This standard serves as a common target for vendors to implement and provides rich functionality for building geospatial applications.

GeoSPARQL follows a modular design. A core component defines top-level RDFS/OWL classes for spatial objects. A geometry component defines RDFS data types for serializing geometry data, RDFS/OWL classes for geometry object types, geometry-related RDF properties, and non-topological spatial query functions for geometry objects. A geometry topology component defines topological query functions. A topological vocabulary component defines RDF properties for asserting topological relations between spatial objects, and a query rewrite component defines rules for transforming a simple triple pattern that tests a topological relation between two features into an equivalent query involving concrete geometries and topological query functions.

The candidate OGC GeoSPARQL Standard documents are available for review and comment at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/80.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 415 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org.