I’ve had a decent understand of what the VALUES
keyword can do for a while (see SPARQL 1.1’s new VALUES keyword and “Creating Tables of Values in your Queries” in my book Learning SPARQL) but lately I’ve gained a greater appreciation of ways to use it. For example, last month I used it to map codes assigned by an entity recognition tool to schema.org classes. This month I found a nice way to use it to control one of Wikidata’s many cool data visualization…
I recently announced that I have joined Ontotext as a full-time Senior Tech Writer. I have admired their free GraphDB triplestore for a long time (for example, I wrote about how well it supports the GeoSPARQL geospatial extension in October of 2020) and I am now learning about all the great capabilities of their commercial products, such as the scalability of GraphDB Enterprise.
I was catching up with my old friend Paul Prescod the other day. We have not only known each other since the early days of XML, but actually before that: “since XML was a four-letter word”, to quote Paul.
Early last year, in the blog entry Doing a podcast interview about technical writing, I described an interview I did for the IEEE Software Engineering Radio podcast. Listening to it again this week I saw that I covered a lot of good ground. Since then I have thought of a few other points I wish I’d mentioned, so here they are in another bulleted list. Because of some recent experience I had enough thoughts about documenting APIs that I gave that discussion its own section below.
When I first heard about the AWS Graph Explorer I assumed that it was a cloud-based tool for use with Neptune, the AWS cloud-based triplestore. After I read Fan Li’s First Impressions of the AWS Graph Explorer I realized that you can install this open source tool locally and point it at any SPARQL endpoint you want, so I cranked up Jena Fuseki on my laptop, loaded some data into it, and installed the Graph Explorer.
I recently wondered “could I run a Python script that includes the rdflib library on my Samsung Android phone?” Five minutes later, I was doing it, and about three of those minutes were spent installing Python.