SPARQL

17 years of my web bookmarks, with metadata

Featuring "75 Bleeding-Edge Search Engines To Beat Google", and more!

Much of the original point of the web was not just linking from one page to another but also saving and managing links, ideally with some metadata. Because of this, all browsers give you some way to save a link to a web page as a bookmark, and they typically let you sort these into a hierarchical arrangement of folders.

GeoSPARQL queries on OSM Data in GraphDB

Or, Querying geospatial data with SPARQL Part 2

Over a year ago, in Querying geospatial data with SPARQL: Part 1, I described my dream of pulling geospatial data down from Open Street Map, loading it into a local triplestore, and then querying it with queries that conformed to the GeoSPARQL standard. At the time, I tried several triplestores and data sources and never quite got there. When I tried it recently with Ontotext’s free version of GraphDB, it all turned out to be quite easy.

The HTML interface to your SPARQL endpoint is not your SPARQL endpoint

Remember what the 'P' in 'SPARQL' stands for.

Something that happens to me now and then: I’ll hear that an organization with a lot of interesting data (science, music, whatever) makes the data available on a SPARQL endpoint. I send my browser to the URL listed as the SPARQL endpoint and I see a web form. I enter a simple query on the web form to retrieve a few random triples, click the form’s button, and the results of my query appear. Then I enter fancier queries to explore the endpoint’s data.

Converting CSV to RDF with Tarql

Quick and easy and, if you like, streaming.

I have seen several tools for converting spreadsheets to RDF over the years. They typically try to cover so many different cases that learning how to use them has taken more effort than just writing a short perl script that uses the split() command, so that’s what I usually ended up doing. (Several years ago I did come up with another way that was more of a cute trick with Turtle syntax.)