Preface
It is hardly surprising that the science they turned to for an explanation of things was divination, the science that revealed connections between words and things, proper names and the deductions that could be drawn from them ...
Why Learn SPARQL?
More and more people are using the query language SPARQL (pronounced “sparkle”) to pull data from a growing collection of public and private data. Whether this data is part of a semantic web project or an integration of two inventory databases on different platforms behind the same firewall, SPARQL is making it easier to access it. In the words of W3C Director and web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, “Trying to use the Semantic Web without SPARQL is like trying to use a relational database without SQL.”
SPARQL was not designed to query relational data, but to query data conforming to the RDF data model. RDF-based data formats have not yet achieved the mainstream status that XML and relational databases have, but an increasing number of IT professionals are discovering that tools that use this data model make it possible to expose diverse sets of data (including, as we’ll see, relational databases) with a common, standardized interface. Accessing this data doesn’t require learning new APIs because both open source and commercial software (including Oracle 11g and IBM’s DB2) are available with SPARQL support that lets you take advantage of these data sources. Because of this data and tool ...
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