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SPARQL Graduates to W3C Recommendation
Posted by
Zonk
on Wed Jan 16, 2008 04:03 PM
from the mazel-tov dept.
from the mazel-tov dept.
KjetilK writes "The W3C just gave SPARQL the stamp of approval. SPARQL is a query language for the Semantic Web, and differs from other query languages in that is usable across different data sources. There are already 14 implementations of the spec available. Most of them are free software. There are also billions of relations out there that are query-able, thanks to the Linking Open Data project. The structured data of Wikipedia is now query-able at DBpedia. Also, have a look at Ivan Herman's presentations on this topic."
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Query (Score:5, Funny)
A what for the what now?
I'd always assumed the semantic web was some meaningless and faded buzzword designed to keep the W3C away from useful stuff. Is it back again with a vengeance?
THE SEMANTIC WEB II: THIS TIME IT'S FOLKSONOMY
Eek.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I spent a minute trying to find out what this was all about, and came upon this from Tim Berners-Lee:
Re:Query (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe I'm just your regular Homer, but reading that, I only make it as far as the second paragraph before my mind has already wandered off to a magical land of (Beer/Chocolate/Boobies)*.
*delete as appropriate
Parent
It is really simple (Score:5, Informative)
so
<http://www.kjetil.kjernsmo.net/foaf#me> <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/knows> <http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i>
simply says that I know timbl. I hope you're less stumped than you used to be.
If you grok this, you've grokked 90% of RDF.
Parent
Re:It is really simple (Score:5, Funny)
Stupid Question Language (SQL) does great for two dimensional sets of data.
Special Peoples' Advanced Retarded Question language (SPARQL) is meant for return results from tree-shaped lumps of textual data, and lets you use regular expressions to figure out where you are in the tree and match nodes and attributes and stuff.
I think smart money is going to continue to arrange data in sets, and in five years, your SQL knowledge will still be serving you in quite good stead.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re:It is really simple (Score:5, Funny)
Good lord, you actually have content there. Sweet Zombie Jesus, it's like if MySpace was irradiated with XML-Rays and mutated into a complete XML-based social network specification [xmlns.com], which requires everyone to write their own specifications and hand-edit XML files.
That's just ... scary.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, FOAF + SIOC [sioc-project.org] + Policy Aware Web [policyawareweb.org] comprises pretty good solutions to the data portability and privacy considerations people have been screaming about lately.
The Semantic Web has been a reality for years now (Score:2, Informative)
Every time there is a story about the Semantic Web here, people trot out the old "It's utopian vaporware" nonsense. The technologies that stand behind the term "Semantic Web" have existed for nearly a decade now and have produced much fruit. Just see Visualizing the Semantic Web [amazon.com] by Geroimenko & Chen (Springer-Verlag, 2nd ed. 2005) which has plenty of real-world examples of using these technologies to get real work done.
Sure, the average joe isn't producing semantically meaningful markup when he uses
Re:The Semantic Web has been a reality for years n (Score:4, Insightful)
Cutting a swathe through your charmingly misplaced snobbery for a second, the ideal thing would be for you to provide a useful example or two of this human thing called SEMANTIWEB, and explain to silly old me how it has already changed my life but I'm just too gosh darned ordinary to have noticed.
Parent
Re:The Semantic Web has been a reality for years n (Score:5, Informative)
In my submission, I gave an example query, which you can run at DBPedia with their standard prefixes:
SELECT ?name ?birth ?death ?person WHERE
{ ?person skos:subject ;
dbpedia2:birth ?birth ;
foaf:name ?name .
OPTIONAL { ?person dbpedia2:death ?death }
FILTER (?birth "1945-01-01"^^xsd:date) . }
ORDER BY ?name"
What this says is "give me the name, birth data and death date of a person that has the following properties:
It is a computer scientist, who has a birth day and a name and optionally a death date, then filter based on the date and order it by name.
There are now billions of such stuff you can query, and if you're open minded, it could indeed change your life.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
To use your current example, what if your person was classified as a "programmer", or "software engineer" rather than a computer scientist? I understand that there are varying meanings for that word, my computer-science teach used to call first year students "computer-scientist
Re: (Score:2)
In my submission, I gave an example query, which you can run at DBPedia with their standard prefixes:
Maybe my own search skills are rusty, but I couldn't find actual documents anywhere in the site, just various gibberish examples. In other words, is there actual documentation - especially a list of properties - anywhere ?
Re: (Score:2)
The W3C is past its usefulness and needs a shakedown IMO.
SPARQL Motion (Score:4, Funny)
With apologies to Donnie Darko [imdb.com]
Semantic Web Quite Important (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
siggh... (Score:2)
Web development surely is a bitch.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
W3C: Making over-engineered pieces of trash in an attempt to handle every single darn scenario in existance (instead of using the right tools for the right job) since 19...well, since ever.
Re: (Score:2)
Which means all these open standards are nothing more than data interchange formats for third-party commercial tools. In order to use the standard, you have to buy a tool. Once again, open != free.
SPARQL (Score:5, Funny)
Why emphasize the semantic web? (Score:5, Informative)
My company stores the schema for our objects in RDF and use SPARQL to query against that schema. The actual data is saved to a relational database (our experiments with an all-RDF system concluded that it's just too slow for large data sets).
The RDF data stores can exist in arbitrary places (they don't need to be local), but I wonder how slow that would be to query.
Nevertheless, I encourage people to at least learn about this stuff. It's good for the same reason that learning about Ruby and Python is a good thing even if you only ever program in Java or C++. RDF and SPARQL make you start thinking about inferences and ways of storing data which allow you to derive more information from your information. When I first learned about RDF I had the same type of aha moments that I had when I first learned a dynamic language (FWIW, it was TADS3) after years of using static languages.
Does it SPARQL?? (Score:2)
Help the dim (Score:2)
This would take off if used with RSS, etc. (Score:2)
"Soccer player with tricot number 11 from club with stadium with >40000 seats born in a country with more than 10M inhabitants [aksw.org]"
but, as far as i can see, it's just too tedious to implement. There should be something in between full-fledged semantics, and stuff like RSS which expose information in a rather un-semantic way.
I just ran in to a problem trying to unify various