XSPARQL: Traveling between the XML and RDF Worlds - and Avoiding the XSLT Pilgrimage

With currently available tools and languages, translating between an existing XML format and RDF is a tedious and error-prone task. The importance of this problem is acknowledged by the W3C GRDDL working group who faces the issue of extracting RDF data out of existing HTML or XML files, as well as by the Web service community around SAWSDL, who need to perform lowering and lifting between RDF data from a semantic client and XML messages for a Web service. However, at the moment, both these groups rely solely on XSLT transformations between RDF/XML and the respective other XML format at hand. In this paper, we propose a more natural approach for such transformations based on merging XQuery and SPARQL into the novel language XSPARQL. We demonstrate that XSPARQL provides concise and intuitive solutions for mapping between XML and RDF in either direction, addressing both the use cases of GRDDL and SAWSDL. We also provide and describe an initial implementation of an XSPARQL engine, available for user evaluation.