This paper investigates techniques for detecting independence of SPARQL queries from updates. A query is independent of an update when the execution of the update does not affect the result of the query. Determining independence is especially useful in the context of huge RDF repositories, where it permits to avoid expensive yet useless re-evaluation of queries. While this problem has been intensively studied for fragments of relational calculus, very few works exist for the standard query language for the semantic web. We report on our investigations on how a notion of independence can be defined in the SPARQL context.