using the SPARQL query: PREFIX foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/> SELECT ?homepage FROM NAMED <http://example.org/joe> WHERE { GRAPH ?g { ?person foaf:homepage ?homepage . ?person foaf:mbox <mailto:joe@example.org> . } } The FROM NAMED here identifies the target graph for the query. Named graphs and quads Prior to the publication of the papers describing named graphs, there was considerable discussion about fulfilling their role within a store by using an arity above that of RDF triple statements: where triples have the form subject predicate object, quads would have a form along the lines of subject predicate object context. Named graphs can be represented this way, as subject predicate object graphname, with the advantage that the graphname part will be a URI, giving the quad Web-global scope compared to arbitrary local statement names. This way of representing quads resp. quad-statements was incorporated in the specification of N-Quads. Formal definition A paper from the WWW 2005 conference by Carroll et al. includes a formal definition of named graphs. Specifications There is currently no specification for named graphs in themselves beyond that described in Carroll et al. (2005) and Carroll and Stickler (2004) (which includes syntaxes for representing named graphs), but they do form part of the SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language specification. Proposed specifications TriX - Named Graphs in XML TriG - Named Graphs in Turtle N-Quads - Named Graphs in N-Triples See also References Semantic Web Graphs