SPARQL Template: A Transformation Language for RDF

Abstract. The general research question addressed in this paper is How to transform RDF into other languages. This is of prime interest to present data selected and extracted from the Web of data in a for-mat suitable for the user (e.g. HTML or CSV). Moreover, RDF can be viewed as a meta-model to represent on the Web of data other languages and models. The above research question then becomes How to generate the concrete syntax of expressions of a given language from their RDF representation. To answer these questions, we present SPARQL Tem-plate, a generic RDF transformation rule language, independant from the output language. We conceived it as a lightweight syntactic exten-sion to SPARQL and we show how to compile it into standard SPARQL. We present a generic transformation rule engine implementing SPARQL Template and several RDF transformers we defined for various output languages, showing the expressive power of the language.