A Transformation Language for RDF based on SPARQL

Abstract : XSLT is a language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents. Despite its 16 years long life, the RDF Semantic Web language still waits its transformation language. Some propositions have been done, relying on and extending XSLT, but none of them became widely used. In this paper, we present a radically new transformation language for RDF, called STTL. It enables to transform RDF into RDF as well as any other text format. The originality and power of STTL is that it is based on SPARQL. We designed it as a lightweight extension to SPARQL and we compile it into standard SPARQL. We present a generic transformation rule engine implementing STTL and several RDF transformers we defined for various output languages, showing STTL's expressive power.