Update Semantics for Interoperability among XML, RDF and RDB - A Case Study of Semantic Presence in CISCO's Unified Presence Systems

XSPARQL is a transformation and querying language that provides an integrated access over heterogeneous data sources on the fly. It is an extension of XQuery which supports a subset of SPARQL and SQL to provide unified access over XML, RDF and RDB formats. In practical applications, data integration does not only require the integrated access over distributed heterogeneous data sources, but also the update of underlying data. XSPARQL in its present state is only a querying and transformation language, hence lacking the update facility. In this paper, we propose an extension of the XSPARQL language with update facility. We present the syntax and semantics for this extension, and we use the real world scenario of semantic presence in CISCO’s Unified Presence Systems to demonstrate the requirement of update facility. Preliminary evaluation of the XSPARQL Update Facility is also presented.