SPARQL City exists to address the analytic needs of modern data systems. We live in a world with more data, in more flavors, stored in nontraditional databases, and a greater need than ever before to make sense of the data. There are great tools targeted to programmers that, given sufficient skill and computer time, can be used to solve virtually any problem. What was lacking was a simple way for people to query the data, to ask either traditional business intelligence questions or the newer metaphor of graph analysis, which is used to find relationships across datasets, often across time.
This is where a group of very talented individuals formed a new standard as part of the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium. The people on this team were composed of members from the largest internet companies, computer companies, and scholars world-wide that have made a career of making data accessible, flexible, and understandable. It took many years to complete. Creating an improved SQL is no simple task. It must be robust enough to be the basis for products 40 years from now.