Diego Berrueta

The XSPARQL member submission has been acknowledged by W3C. XSPARQL is a new language that results from the merge of XQuery and SPARQL, and it provides a solution to transform data between RDF and XML.

I discovered XSPARQL while I was working on a related idea that I called XSLT+SPARQL as part of my PhD research. I was immediately captivated XSPARQL because it shares the same aims as XSLT+SPARQL, but it is a much more clever idea. While I was trying to integrate SPARQL in XSLT, Axel Polleres and the rest of the XSPARQL team found a much more elegant approach using XQuery. I humbly confess that it never occurred to me to replace XSLT with XQuery, probably because I'm experienced with the former, but I have little knowledge about the latter. When compared to XSPARQL, my XSLT+SPARQL looks as a ugly hack (well, I never said otherwise). Both approaches were presented during the ESWC2008 at Tenerife. XSPARQL was picked as one of the best papers of the conference, while mine was silently presented in a co-located workshop. I think it's just fair.

When I knew of their intention to make a submission to W3C, I offered my collaboration to the XSPARQL crew. My modest contribution were a couple of novel use cases.