XTech 2006: SPARQLing Services

I’m currently at XTech in Amsterdam and earlier this morning I gave my talk, “SPARQLing Services“, an overview of SPARQL, with an emphasis on the SPARQL protocol and how SPARQL can benefit Web 2.0/AJAX applications.
The full paper is online at the conference website.
I’ve also uploaded the slides to my website which you can view online. They’re available as PDF and an OpenDocument presentation.
The talk seemed to go well, and there were a few questions afterward. I chickened out from giving a live demo, as I’d had a few instances of Google Earth crashing my laptop. I’ve already blogged the basics of that hack.
I did another demo of a little AJAX hack that used Elias and Lee’s SPARQL-JSON library which was easy to work with. I’ll get that demo published in a few days. I realised along the way that using the JSON output of a SPARQL query its quite simple to create “data aware” AJAX widgets.
I think it’ll be quite trivial to create a set of standard components that take as input a SPARQL query that returns data in a specific format (i.e. specific columns in the result set). Once I’ve got my horrible hack online, I’m going to try making one or two of the Yahoo! Javascript Widgets capable of accepting SPARQL input.