Traqula: Providing a Foundation for The Evolving SPARQL Ecosystem Through Modular Query Parsing, Transformation, and Generation

SPARQL engines continue to diverge in the versions and language extensions they support. With SPARQL 1.2 nearing completion and the working group’s plans toward future maintenance, this divergence is likely to grow. As a result, language tools that aim to support multiple SPARQL versions and dialects face increasing maintenance costs. Furthermore, areas such as SPARQL federation become harder to manage. To address these challenges, we introduce Traqula, a modular TypeScript-based framework for parsing, transforming, and generating SPARQL queries. This article presents Traqula’s architecture and its builder-based dependency-injection design, and we show how these components provide modular support for SPARQL 1.1 and 1.2 parsing and generation. Traqula enables round-tripping, supports generic algebraic and AST transformations, and delivers significantly faster parsing compared to current JavaScript-based SPARQL parsing. Traqula’s modular architecture enables flexible experimentation for researchers, and it is production-ready thanks to extensive testing and modern development techniques. Looking forward, Traqula lays the groundwork for supporting additional query languages, developing generic rewriting modules for SPARQL federation engines, and building robust tooling for an increasingly diverse SPARQL ecosystem.

@inproceedings{desmet_traqula_eswc_2026,
  author = {De Smet, Jitse and Taelman, Ruben},
  title = {Traqula: Providing a Foundation for The Evolving SPARQL Ecosystem Through Modular Query Parsing, Transformation, and Generation},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 23rd Extended Semantic Web Conference},
  year = {2026},
  month = may,
  url = {https://traqula-resource.jitsedesmet.be/}
}