Re: Federated directory of social services - could Façade-X help?

Hi all,

I've developed (a rather novel, if I say so myself) approach to virtualise
REST APIs as SPARQL services. Unlike SPARQL Anything, it abstracts away the
API contract and provides a clean, RDF-vocabulary-based mapping.

Naturally it comes with the performance caveats of data retrieval from REST
APIs. Some queries are better suited than others: lookups often execute in
sub-second time, while aggregation queries (e.g., counting all entities)
are possible in principle but likely infeasible due to long execution times.

The system can also be used as an ETL tool to extract RDF from RDF APIs.

It is not currently open-source because I am considering the license and
exploring the use cases. But given the right circumstances and incentives,
I guess it could be.

Feel free to contact me if you're interested.

Best,

Martynas
atomgraph.com

On Thu, Mar 26, 2026 at 1:47 PM Benjamin Degenhart <
benjamin.degenhart@foerderfunke.org> wrote:

> Dear Data Façades Community Group,
>
> I am following your work with curiosity and wanted to reach out regarding
> an upcoming project. As a freelance software developer I will be working
> with the Civic Data Lab, a Ministry-funded NGO in Germany. The goal is to
> create a federated directory of social counseling services in Germany. We
> will fetch data from the databases of various organisations that
> already maintain parts of this directory. The plan is to convert
> the heterogeneous sources (we expect a mix of APIs with JSON output, HTML
> scraping, CSV files, etc.) into one RDF schema. This schema will build on
> existing vocabulary (e.g. the Core Public Organisation Vocabulary from
> SEMIC) and gradually mature as we solve the challenges of integrating all
> these sources while simultaneously working on the usage scenarios of this
> new federated directory. So our challenge will be exactly as you put it: a
> "homogeneous view over heterogeneous data sources."
>
> Is the Façade-X method something I could use here? What approaches would
> you recommend? Which libraries are already usable?
> I'd really appreciate your thoughts and advice on this.
>
> Best regards
> Benjamin Degenhart
> www.linkedin.com/in/bdegenhart
>
>