SPARQLing Services at XTech

I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve had a paper accepted at XTech, I believe the schedule is still being compiled, but I’ve had confirmation that my paper “SPARQLing Services” has been accepted.
Here’s the abstract:

Backed by the flexibility of the RDF data model, and consisting of both a query language and data access protocol SPARQL has the potential to become a key component in Web 2.0 applications. SPARQL could provide a common query language for all Web 2.0 applications.


Developing and enhancing a web service API involves dealing with the conflicting needs of end users. The push towards ever finer grained access to data must be balanced against the performance and efficiency costs of returning redundant data. By supporting a query end-point a service may let clients effectively design their own API, with corresponding performance improvements.


This paper will review the SPARQL specifications and its potential benefits to Web 2.0 applications. Focusing on the SPARQL protocol for RDF, the paper will provide implementation guidance for developers interested in adding SPARQL support to their applications.


Issues such as mapping existing data sources onto the RDF model will be introduced alongside other fundamental concerns such as efficiency and security.


Trivial, but useful extensions to the SPARQL protocol, including multiple output options, and integration with AJAX applications will also be demonstrated.


Drawing on services (e.g. GovTrack, Opera Community) that already support SPARQL querying, the examples used in this paper will be grounded in real deployed applications and services.

The other paper I submitted, concerning a model for online hosting and aggregation of RDF content didn’t get accepted — unsurprising given the very high quality of submissions, and I’m certainly not complaining. The work I’ve been doing there should hopefully see the light of day on XMLArmyKnife.org very soon.
In the meantime I’ve got to finish my paper for the Jena User Conference. I thought I’d write up the work I’ve been doing on the second release of Slug, my semantic web crawler. It’s now nicely configurable, has a pluggable architecture, and supports persistent storage of data.
I’m also very pleased to say that Katie and Priya have had their XTech paper acccepted too. We’ve started a tech blog for the Ingenta engineering department to try and share more of what we’ve been doing with RDF, RSS, and other related geekery.