Scientific SPARQL: Semantic Web Queries over Scientific Data

We define an extended version of the Semantic Web query language SPARQL called Scientific SPARQL, SciSPARQL. It is targeted mainly at scientific computing and laboratory data management. SciSPARQL includes expressions, numeric multi-dimensional array operations, user-defined functions, aggregate functions, and function views. A prototype system translates SciSPARQL to a Datalog dialect which is extensible by external functions implemented in a regular programming language. The system automatically recognizes collections in RDF Turtle statements that represent numerical multi-dimensional arrays in order to represent them with a special native data type. A back-end relational database provides persistent storage.