RDF

Using the AWS Graph Explorer with Fuseki and local datasets

An open source visual graph navigator.

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.

Learn RDF in Y minutes

Where X = RDF

I have always loved the website Learn X in Y minutes, which provides short crash courses in several dozen programming languages plus additional topics such as set theory and git. Its home page tells us “Take a whirlwind tour of your next favorite language”; I’ll bet it’s especially popular with applicants on their way to job interviews where languages that are new to them are in the job description.

Generating websites with SPARQL and Snowman, part 2

With Rhizome's excellent ArtBase SPARQL endpoint.

In part one of this two-part series, we saw how the open source Snowman static web site generator can generate websites with data from a SPARQL endpoint. I showed how I created a sample website project with its snowman new command and then reconfigured the project to retrieve a list of artists from the Rhizome ArtBase endpoint, a repository of data about digital artworks since 1999. Here in part two I will build on that to add lists of artists’ works with links to Rhizome pages about…

Queries to explore a dataset

Even a schemaless one.

I recently worked on a project where we had a huge amount of RDF and no clue what was in there apart from what we saw by looking at random triples. I developed a few SPARQL queries to give us a better idea of the dataset’s content and structure and these queries are generic enough that I thought that they could be useful to other people.

In my last posting I described Carnegie Mellon University’s Index of Digital Humanities Conferences project, which makes over 60 years of Digital Humanities research abstracts and relevant metadata available on both the project’s website and as a file of zipped CSV that they update often. I also described how I developed scripts to convert all that CSV to some pretty nice RDF and made the scripts available on github. I finished with a promise to follow up by showing some of the…