Recently, many question answering systems that derive answers from linked data repositories have been developed. The purpose of this survey is to identify the common features-approaches of the semantic question answering (SQA) systems, although many different and prototype systems have been designed. The SQA systems use a formal query language like SPARQL and knowledge of a specific vocabulary. This paper analyses different frameworks, architectures or systems that perform semantic question answering and classifies SQA systems based on different criteria.