SPARQL entity lists inside select queries

Question

In the following DBpedia query, is there a way to consolidate the UNIONs into a single pattern?

PREFIX prop: <http://resedia.org/ontology/&gt;
PREFIX res: <http://resedia.org/resource/&gt;
SELECT DISTINCT ?language ?label 
WHERE { 
  {res:Spain prop:language ?language} 
    UNION
  {res:France prop:language ?language}
    UNION
  {res:Italy prop:language ?language}
  ?language rdfs:label ?label .
  FILTER langMatches(lang(?label), "en") 
}

The SPARQL spec mentions something about RDF collections but I don't really understand what it's describing. It seemed like the following syntax should work, but it didn't.

PREFIX prop: <http://resedia.org/ontology/&gt;
PREFIX res: <http://resedia.org/resource/&gt;
SELECT DISTINCT ?language ?label 
WHERE { 
  (res:Spain res:France res:Italy) prop:language ?language
  ?language rdfs:label ?label .
  FILTER langMatches(lang(?label), "en") 
}

Is there a way to define a list (or "multiset", or "bag") of URIs like this inside a SELECT query?

Answer 1

Simple answer: no.

(res:Spain res:France res:Italy) prop:language ?language

means 'match where a list containing Spain, France and Italy has a language', i.e. the list itself has a language.

You could do:

?country prop:language ?language . ?language rdfs:label ?label . 
FILTER ( ?country == res:Spain || ?country == res:France || ?country == res:Italy )

which is shorter, but may be slower.

(I had a feeling SPARQL 1.1 had an 'IN' feature, but I don't see it in the drafts)