Learning SPARQL, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6. Updating Data with SPARQL

It’s great when you can pull data out of a collection and rearrange and cross-reference it any way you want, but when you can use a standard query language to add data to that collection, and to delete and update its data, you have what you need to build serious full-fledged applications around RDF’s flexible data model. The SPARQL 1.1 Update specification describes the syntax and options for doing this, and although it’s a more recent addition to SPARQL, several implementations already support it. This chapter uses Fuseki, one of the simplest SPARQL Update implementations, to demonstrate the various examples.

Note

Most implementations you find of the SPARQL Update language will be built into triplestores, letting you act on the data in the triplestore. Being essentially a database management program (if not a relational one), a triplestore should let you query the data with the SPARQL query language and manage it with the update language.

1.1 Alert

SPARQL Update was new for SPARQL 1.1. SPARQL 1.0 defined no way to update data, so triplestores with SPARQL support originally relied on proprietary extensions to let you update their data. You may still see this with older triplestores.

In this chapter, we’ll learn about:

Getting Started with Fuseki

Just enough about Fuseki to try out all the key parts of SPARQL Update

Adding Data to a Dataset

How to add triples specified in your query and triples from remote sources to the dataset’s default ...