SPARQL is a standard query language for RDF that has undergone two iterations (1.0 and 1.1) through the W3C process. SPARQL 1.1 includes updates to RDF stores, subqueries, aggregation, property paths, negation, and remote querying. It also defines separate specifications for querying, updating, protocols, graph store protocols, and federated querying. Apache Jena provides implementations of SPARQL 1.1 and tools like Fuseki for deploying SPARQL servers.