The GQL project draws on multiple sources or inputs, notably existing industrial languages and a new section of the SQL standard. In preparatory discussions within WG3 surveys of the history<ref name="GQLs history">{{cite web|url=https://s3.amazonaws.com/artifacts.opencypher.org/website/materials/DM32.2/DM32.2-2018-00085R1-recent_history_of_property_graph_query_languages.pdf|title=''An overview of the recent history of Graph Query Languages''|last=Lindaaker|first=Tobias|date=May 2018|publisher=opencypher.org|access-date=October 6, 2019}}</ref> and comparative content of some of these inputs<ref name="Summary Chart">{{cite web|url=https://s3.amazonaws.com/artifacts.opencypher.org/website/materials/DM32.2/DM32.2-2018-00086r1-summary-chart-of-cypher-pgql-gcore.pdf|title=''Summary Chart of Cypher, PGQL, and G-Core''|last=Plantikow|first=Stefan|date=May 2018|publisher=opencypher.org|access-date=November 3, 2019}}</ref> were presented. GQL will beis a declarative language with its own distinct syntax, playing a similar role to SQL in the building of a database application. Other graph query languages have been defined which offer direct procedural features such as branching and looping (Apache Tinkerpop's Gremlin,<ref name="Gremlin 2015">{{cite book|url=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2815073|title= Proceedings of the 15th Symposium on Database Programming Languages|last=Rodriguez|first=Marko A.|chapter= The Gremlin graph traversal machine and language (Invited talk)|date=2015|pages= 1–10|publisher=ACM|doi=10.1145/2815072.2815073|arxiv= 1508.03843|isbn=9781450339025|s2cid=32623848|access-date=November 10, 2019}}</ref>), and GSQL,<ref name="GSQL white paper"/> making it possible to traverse a graph iteratively to perform a class of graph algorithms, but GQL will not directly incorporate such features.<ref name="Wood Graph Query">{{cite journal|url=https://dl.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=2206879&ftid=1212198&dwn=1&CFID=106456621&CFTOKEN=92daacebb1744396-220C1ECA-F98C-4552-03541423FDE04D18|title= Query languages for graph databases|last=Wood|first=Peter T.|journal=ACM SIGMOD Record|date=25 April 2012|volume=41|issue=1|pages=50–60|publisher=ACM|doi=10.1145/2206869.2206879|s2cid=13537601|access-date=October 25, 2019}}</ref><ref name="GQL foundations">{{cite journal|url=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3104031|title= Foundations of Modern Query Languages for Graph Databases
|access-date=November 12, 2019}}</ref> However, GQL is envisaged as a specific case of a more general class of graph languages, which will share a graph type system and a calling interface for procedures that process graphs.
