July 2011
Beginner
252 pages
6h 37m
English
Content preview from Learning SPARQLBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 1. Jumping Right In: Some Data and Some Queries
Chapter 2 provides some background on RDF, the semantic web, and where SPARQL fits in, but before going into that, let’s start with a bit of hands-on experience writing and running SPARQL queries to keep the background part from looking too theoretical.
But first, what is SPARQL? The name is a recursive acronym for SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language, which is described by a set of specifications from the W3C.
Note
The W3C, or World Wide Web Consortium, is the same standards body responsible for HTML, XML, and CSS.
As you can tell from the “RQL” part of its name, SPARQL is designed to query RDF, but you’re not limited to querying data stored in one of the RDF formats. Commercial and open source utilities are available to treat relational data, XML, spreadsheets, and other formats as RDF so that you can issue SPARQL queries against these data sources—or against combinations of these sources, which is one of the most powerful aspects of the SPARQL/RDF combination.
The “Protocol” part of SPARQL’s name refers to the rules for how a client program and a SPARQL processing server exchange SPARQL queries and results. These rules are specified in a separate document from the query specification document and are mostly an issue for SPARQL processor developers. You can go far with the query language without worrying about the protocol, so this book doesn’t go into any detail about it.
The Data to Query
Chapter 2 describes more about RDF and ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.