SPARQL 1.1 Entailment Regimes

SPARQL is a query language for data that is stored natively as RDF or viewed as RDF via middleware. The main mechanism for computing query results in SPARQL is subgraph matching: RDF triples in both the queried RDF data and the query pattern are interpreted as nodes and edges of directed graphs, and the resulting query graph is matched to the data graph using variables as wild cards. Various W3C standards, including RDF and OWL, provide semantic interpretations for RDF graphs that allow additional RDF statements to be inferred from explicitly given assertions. It is desirable to utilize SPARQL as a query language in these cases as well, but this requires basic graph pattern matching to be defined using semantic entailment relations instead of explicitly given graph structures. Such extensions of the SPARQL semantics are called entailment regimes within this document and entailment regimes for standard entailment relations in the semantic web such as RDF entailment, RDFS entailment, etc. are defined in this document.