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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.
Programming IT Technology
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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Firehose:SPARQL is a W3C Recommendation by KjetilK (186133)
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SPARQL Graduates to W3C Recommendation 25 Comments More /

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  • Query (Score:5, Funny)

    by minginqunt (225413) on Wednesday January 16 2008, @04:07PM (#22070772) Homepage Journal
    A query language for the semantic web...

    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.

    • I spent a minute trying to find out what this was all about, and came upon this from Tim Berners-Lee:

      The Semantic Web isn't just about putting data on the web. It is about making links, so that a person or machine can explore the web of data. With linked data, when you have some of it, you can find other, related, data.

      Like the web of hypertext, the web of data is constructed with documents on the web. However, unlike the web of hypertext, where links are relationships anchors in hypertext documents

      • Re:Query (Score:5, Insightful)

        by minginqunt (225413) on Wednesday January 16 2008, @04:18PM (#22070906) Homepage Journal
        So, uh, yeah. I'm just as stumped as you are.

        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

      • It is really simple (Score:5, Informative)

        by KjetilK (186133) <.moc.satupmoc. .ta. .klitejk.> on Wednesday January 16 2008, @04:31PM (#22071014) Homepage Journal
        Oh, it is actually really simple. See, first thing is that you link two documents. That's good old HTML. Then, you realise that you would want to link anything. Like persons. So, you give those persons a URI. You can't retrieve a person over the Internet, that's why it is a URI, not a URL, but you can get a description of the person. And then you realise that you want to say something about the nature of the relationship. So you put in a third URI that says something about the relationship. For example that the person knows that other person, or is his son, or something.

        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.

        • Re:It is really simple (Score:5, Funny)

          by smitty_one_each (243267) * on Wednesday January 16 2008, @04:40PM (#22071108) Homepage Journal
          Let me (perhaps over-) simplify this for you.
          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.
          • Yup, that's a gross oversimplification. SQL is not very well suited for the kind of stuff we're talking about. It is very constrained, and doesn't help you in large data integration problems. There are a lot of money in huge data integration problems. And that's where most of the money up to now has been, big industry merges, high-level execs realising their SQL doesn't cut it. And that's why Oracle is on board. But SPARQL is most interesting when people are exposing data on the open web, and we're starting

        • Re:It is really simple (Score:5, Funny)

          by _xeno_ (155264) on Wednesday January 16 2008, @05:51PM (#22072012) Homepage Journal

          <http://www.kjetil.kjernsmo.net/foaf#me [kjernsmo.net]>

          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.

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by KjetilK (186133)
            Hehe, well, yeah, FOAF's been around for ages, it predates pretty much the whole social networking craze. But the XML thing is kinda arbitrary, it is just one of several ways to write RDF. I don't really write RDF as XML by hand anymore, except for that single file. I might use RDF/XML if it is generated, if I hand-write, I use Turtle [w3.org].

            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.

    • 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

      • Sure, the average joe isn't producing semantically meaningful markup when he uses his whizbang Web 2.0 sites, but then again what the average joe produces isn't worth all that much anyway. Even if the Semantic Web doesn't expand to include all Internet activity, it has and continues to do much good.

        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.
        • Well, no, it hasn't changed your life just yet, but you could check out a few links in the story, there is a lot of potential there. I'm not going to run off on conspiracy theories, but it is pretty clear that many big players likes to keep things under locks, that's a hurdle that makes this take slightly longer.

          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.
          • The thing that bugs me a lot about this so-called semantic web is its reliance on humans to be accurate. Our minds do not operate on the same clear-cut logic as a machine, in other words we are able to make inferences from semantics.

            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

          • 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 ?

    • Here's IMO the sign that the W3C needs a swift kick in the pills. A query language for the semantic web?

      The W3C is past its usefulness and needs a shakedown IMO.

  • SPARQL Motion (Score:4, Funny)

    by grassy_knoll (412409) on Wednesday January 16 2008, @04:14PM (#22070852) Homepage
    "Sometimes, I doubt your commitment to SPARQL Motion! "

    With apologies to Donnie Darko [imdb.com] ...
  • Though the Semantic web is not important for the casual user--I think Google is pretty good now--but for a machine trying to converse with a human being, the semantic web is a great advance. I myself have an open source project on Googlecode that had a place holder for just this item. Thank god it's coming along.
    • Glad you're working on it. But I can't agree Google is doing so good. One of my customers is a bunch of librarians, and they see a lot of people seeking advice on how to find information. The information is out there, but it is so hard getting the keywords right that people can't actually do it. So, they turn to skilled information gatherers, i.e. librarians, who, supported by people with extensive domain knowledge, can point them the right way. This has shown us that pure text search is overrated, people d
  • Yet another web markup thingy i have to learn..

    Web development surely is a bitch.
    • Dont worrie about it. In general, if the W3C made something, it, by definition, will suck, even if its fully implemented by a bunch of vendors. So what you do is wait for the development tools that abstract it, and use that instead.

      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.
      • >Dont worrie about it. In general, if the W3C made something, it, by definition, will suck, even if its fully implemented by a bunch of vendors

        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.
  • Am I the only person who looked at that name 'SPARQL' and went 'Is that Sun's new name for MySQL [slashdot.org]?'

  • Why emphasize the semantic web? (Score:5, Informative)

    by HappyEngineer (888000) on Wednesday January 16 2008, @05:20PM (#22071592) Homepage
    I suppose it's cool to emphasize the semantic web use of SPARQL. But, at its core SPARQL is a query language for RDF data stores. It takes some learning, but using SPARQL against an RDF data store feels much cleaner than using SQL against a relational database. It's slower though. Much slower. That's why it works best for small data sets.

    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.
  • Free mod points to anyone who can give me the "So What" summary. The summary is useless and the linked articles failed to inform. Usually this just mans a circle jerk, but who know, there might be something useful or important in there.
  • I think the semantic web would be incredible, once it is widely implemented by content providers - a great example is dbpedia's query
    "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

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