SPARQL @ 6 months

I've been keeping an eye on the things people are saying about SPARQL and how SPARQL is being used ever since we published the W3C SPARQL Recommendations back in January. Of course, SPARQL has been around for much longer than half a year (as noted, for example, by Deepak Singh who "hadn’t even realized that [SPARQL] was in draft status"). Here's a summary of some of the more interesting or noteworthy ones. Please share any of your favorites in the comments!

Upon announcing SPARQL

• The requisite (?) Slashdot thread
• Headlines summarizing the announcement included "W3C adds a touch of Sparql to Web 2.0", "Semantic Web takes big step forward", "Adding Some SPARQL to the Semantic Web"

Positive Impressions

• Sometimes I doubt your commitment to SPARQL Motion - wherein the author greets SPARQL with "Freakin yay!" and awaits the day that SPARQL "help[s] us get better porn faster, which is of course the benchmark of all new advancements in technology."
• "SPARQL takes us one step closer to the idea of software being something that users create rather than something users use."
• "However, HTML 5 may not be the most important recent standards announcement that the W3C has made."
• "SPARQL is the glue that makes this global data mesh usable, and it was just ratified this year.  The Web's voice just cracked."

Negative Impressions

• Unhappy With SPARQL - unsatisfied with the verbose syntax, the lack of arbitrary selectable expressions, and the ASK query form
• Have you heard of SPARQL? - worries that SPARQL queries are so targeted as to miss accidental discovery of interesting information and that this might be a new technology burden for small Web site developers
• The problems of SPARQL - enumerates three problems touching on the RDF data model's complexity, SPARQL's relative anonymity (compared to SQL), and a perceived lack of expressivity

Explanatory/tutorial Writings

• Bee Node: A FOAF Tale - Leigh Dodds's whimsical exploration of common SPARQL patterns. (The deconstructed version.)
• RIP Arnie Humour - SPARQL and The Terminator, together again for the first time

• Understanding SPARQL - A tutorial by Andrew Matthews on IBM developerWorks that teaches SPARQL "through the example of a team tracking and journaling system for a virtual company."
• Introduzione al Web Semantico - OK, this Italian tutorial Simone Onofri only has a few slides on SPARQL, but slide 48 (introducing SPARQL) is so beautiful that I wanted to include this anyway.
• Why SPARQL? - From yours truly.

Using SPARQL

• Dan Brickley has a large collection of SPARQL-related writings, including these topics: dynamic FOAF groups via SPARQL; UUIDs for dealing with varying views of social-graph data; visual SPARQL query tools; SPARQL over XMPP (Jabber)
• Henry Story uses SPARQL to find international calling codes
• Arto Bendiken reports on Dries Buytaert's keynote at Drupalcon Boston envisioning a SPARQL-enabled Drupal 7.x release

Miscellaneous

• Summary of the SPARQL BoF at WWW2008 - discussion of various SPARQL extension features
• SP2Bench: A SPARQL Performance Benchmark - Based on DBLP-style generated data sets
• Volunteer recruitment for RDF store project on Hadoop - Not strictly SPARQL, but will include a SPARQL implementation on top of a Hadoop + Hbase + MapReduce system

Of course, the past six months have also seen plenty of new Linked Data deployments (often with accompanying SPARQL endpoints) as well as a bevy of new implementations, and enhancements and upgrades to existing implementations. And SPARQL continues to be used as the data-access bedrock of Semantic Web applications. All in all, the future looks bright--some might even say it SPARQLs.