A Comprehensive Comparative study of SPARQL and SQL

Abstract

With development of Semantic Web, much research focuses on various technologies about Web ontology. Especially, for management and searching of data in Web ontology, various storages based on RDB and query languages (e.g., SPARQL, RDQL and RQL) have been developed with activity. SPARQL cannot search data in RDB model because RDB model use SQL as query language. The Resource Description Format (RDF) is used to represent information modeled as a graph: a set of individual objects, along with a set of connections among those objects. In that role, RDF is one of the pillars of the so-called Semantic Web. RDF Data represents a graph. Graphs are natural way to represent things and the relationships between them. RDF data stores are optimized to efficiently to recognize graph sub-patterns and there is a standard query language SPARQL that is used to query these data stores1. This paper is intended to show the differences between the two query languages. i.e. SPARQL and SQL.