Ian Jacob’s recent interview with NASA’s Jean Holm on the W3C website is an excellent case study of semantic web technology. It’s not a long article, so I recommend that you read the whole thing. Here are few points that caught me eye:

In Pulling SKOS prefLabel and altLabel values out of DBpedia, I described how Wikipedia and DBpedia store useful data about alternative names for resources described on Wikipedia, and I showed how you can use these to populate a SKOS dataset’s alternative and preferred label properties. Today I want to show how to use these as part of an application that lets you retrieve data even when you don’t necessarily have the right name for something—for example, retrieving a picture of Bob…

I’ve managed to fill a key gap in the world’s supply of Linked Open Data by publishing triples that connect Mad Magazine film parody titles to the DBpedia URIs of the actual films. For example:

While beta testing Talis’s Kasabi, I got to wondering about the data publishing market: who out there is hosting raw data, potentially charging for it and passing money along to the data’s providers? Poking around, I learned who the key names are. (Corrections welcome.) I accidentally stumbled across a few more when I followed a tweet from @xmlgrrl (a.k.a. Eve Maler, a friend of mine in the XML world since it was the SGML world) and started looking at her husband Eli’s blog.…

Retrieval of triples from relational databases is a popular topic in the semantic web world, but I was recently wondering how much trouble it would be to go in the opposite direction: to retrieve data from a SPARQL endpoint and load it into a relational database. It wasn’t much trouble at all. When you retrieve the results in the SPARQL query results XML format, a straightforward XSLT spreadsheet can convert it into the necessary SQL INSERT statements. I was able to automate the data…

In a podcast of a radio show I was listening to recently, the host asserted that 80s rapper Schoolly D had scored most of director Abel Ferrara’s films. I was curious about this, so I went to IMDB’s page for Ferrara, clicked on the first film title, scrolled down, clicked “Full cast and crew”, checked the music credit, returned to Ferrara’s main page, and repeated the last few steps… until I realized that one SPARQL query could create a single list of…

I’ve described in earlier postings ([1],[2]) how I mostly use Jena ARQ to play with SPARQL 1.1 queries. To try out the new SPARQL Update commands, I wanted to use a simple triplestore where I could add, replace, and delete triples, and Jena Fuseki has turned out to be a very simple way to do this.