I'm very pleased to see the publication of the latest SPARQL specification. It looked for a while as if FROM was going to be removed from the language, i.e. specifying the data set would be a protocol issue and not something supported in the query language. This seemed like a bad idea to me, not … Continue reading New SPARQL Specification →

Unfortunately, despite being dead keen and a sucker for a free glass of wine, I'm not going to be able to make it to the SPARQLing days in Tuscany. Like Danny I was pleased to be invited, unfortunately the timing isn't good. Maybe next time. I'm consoling myself with the prospect of drinking Triples in … Continue reading SPARQLing Days and a Twinkle update →

While the final schedule isn't up yet, I've received an email to note that one of my XTech proposals has been accepted. The paper is titled "Connecting Social Content Services using FOAF, RDF and REST", and here's the abstract I submitted: A growing number of "social content" applications such as flickr, del.icio.us, audioscrobbler, and AllConsuming … Continue reading Speaking at XTech: Social Content Web Services →

At some point I'm intending to write a little series of tutorials for Sparql which, coupled with Twinkle, will hopefully prove useful to people getting to grips with the language. For the moment though I thought I'd post a few sample queries to get people started. The examples include some that refer to my own … Continue reading Sample Sparql Queries →

I've just uploaded another iteration of my Java Sparql query tool, Twinkle. Read the original announcement for background; read the list of changes; or just download Twinkle 0.2. The release basically adds some usability niceties such as accelerator keys, tool tips, status bar, etc. Errors processing queries should now also now be visible in the … Continue reading Twinkle 0.2 →

In the spirit of release early and often, I've just uploaded the first snapshot of Twinkle, a query tool for Sparql. Twinkle is a simple Java interface that wraps the ARQ query library that Andy Seaborne is currently building as an add-on to Jena. ARQ is still under development and is not yet a supported … Continue reading Twinkle: A Sparql Query Tool →

Stefano says The future of the semantic web is LSI. While I agree that LSI is definitely a cool technology, and is an interesting alternative to Bayesian techniques I don't agree that it's the future of the semantic web. The semantic web isn't about text analysis. It's not about data mining a document corpus. But … Continue reading Semantic Web != Text Analysis; Semantic Web != Controlled Vocabularies →

Mark Birbeck posted to rdfweb-dev on Friday to announce an XForms-based FOAF creator. To use the tool you'll need to install the latest version (and patches) of Forms Player. As Birbeck notes in the announcement the demo does nicely show-case some of the XForms features, notably extracting information for the form labels from the demo, … Continue reading XForms and FOAF and Cross-Player Woes →

A quick follow up to my Views in Triple Stores posting. Andrew Newman describes how my requirements can be addressed within Kowari. He also noted (privately) that views are crucial for lots of use cases, pointing me at this thread on kowari-general. Richard Cyganiak was less keen on the idea. He's right that too wide … Continue reading More on Triplestore Views →