Querying the Semantic Web via Rules

The problem of querying RDF data is a central issue for the development of the Semantic Web. The query language SPARQL has become the standard language for querying RDF since its W3C standardization in 2008. However, the 2008 version of this language missed some important functionalities: reasoning capabilities to deal with RDFS and OWL vocabularies, navigational capabilities to exploit the graph structure of RDF data, and a general form of recursion much needed to express some natural queries. To overcome those limitations, a new version of SPARQL, called SPARQL 1.1, was released in 2013, which includes entailment regimes for RDFS and OWL vocabularies, and a mechanism to express navigation patterns through regular expressions. Nevertheless, there are useful navigation patterns that cannot be expressed in SPARQL 1.1, and the language lacks a general mechanism to express recursive queries. This chapter is a gentle introduction to a tractable rule-based query language, in fact, an extension of Datalog with value invention, stratified negation, and falsum, that is powerful enough to define SPARQL queries enhanced with the desired functionalities focussing on a core fragment of the OWL 2 QL profile of OWL 2.