Learning SPARQL, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8. Working with SPARQL Query Result Formats

SPARQL engines can usually return query results in a range of different syntaxes. The choices include offerings for everyone from professional software engineers to business analysts who are happiest with Excel spreadsheets. Fortunately, the syntaxes are part of the SPARQL family of standards, so that when you develop something to process a query result format from one particular query engine, you can use it with others.

In this chapter, we’ll look at the standardized formats:

SPARQL Query Results XML Format

This is a simple, straightforward XML format that makes it easy to use query results in an XML-based system such as a publishing workflow. In this section, we’ll see how to turn this format into another standardized kind of XML that you can then convert into a PDF file with open source tools.

SPARQL Query Results JSON Format

The JavaScript Object Notation is an increasingly popular format for passing data between both local and remote processes, giving you new opportunities to integrate SPARQL tools with other systems.

SPARQL Query Results CSV and TSV Formats

You can pull data in Comma-Separated Value and Tab-Separated Value text files directly into spreadsheet programs such as Excel and OpenOffice. As we’ll see, these two formats have more differences between them than just the delimiter characters that separate returned values.

An important issue with each format, apart from the actual syntax it uses to represent the query ...