Advanced Sparql endpoint
Before detailing the features of this project, I will introduce quickly what is web semantic. If you already know what it is you can jump directly to the third paragraph. I will simply use the first sentence of Wikipedia’s page as I find it simple to understand and clear.
The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.
Following this idea, some websites started to publish semantic data a little while ago. From all the initiatives, we can note a project called DBpedia which aims to be the semantic version of Wikipedia. Of course many technologies were developed to encode and query all these new information.
The one we are interested in for this project is called Sparql. It uses a SQL like syntax and enables to query semantic data sets.
Let’s say you want to find something in DBpedia. You have 2 options:
- Browse the articles and find the bit of information you want reading the texts
- Write the Sparql query which will return the desired information
Of course to write the query you will need a bit of knowledge on how the data set is formed and on Sparql, but using this you can automate the gathering of information.
Websites like DBpedia offer a Sparql endpoint where you can type in your queries. The main problem with this is that you need some knowledge of the data set you’re querying.
The idea of the project was to include some logic in the endpoint to make as easy as possible the use of this tool. To this end, I created a Sparql editor with advanced features such as auto-completion and error prevention.
When you access the endpoint, it will ask you which dataset you want to query. This will allow to get the namespaces, classes and properties available which you can consult and will appear in the auto-completion.
More details will come in a second post and a demo version will be available soon !
