RUL: a Declarative Language for Updating RDF Data Master’s Thesis

Semantic Web applications are striving nowadays for managing changes of persistent resource descriptions created according to RDFS schemata. To cope with this demands, a declarative update language for RDF graphs is proposed, which is based on the paradigms of query and view languages RQL and RVL. This language, called RUL, ensures that the execution of the update primitives on nodes and arcs neither violates the semantics of the RDF model nor the semantics of the given RDFS schema. In addition, RUL supports fine-grained updates at the class and property instance level, set-oriented updates with a deterministic semantics and takes benefit of the full expressive power of RQL for restricting the range of variables to nodes and arcs of RDF graphs. The language has been implemented in the context of RDF Suite, as an extension of RQL. The implementation relies on a database update language and generates SQL update statements for the various database representations used in RDF Suite.