Re: Welcome to the community group on Bridging GraphQL and RDF

Dear All,

I'm a knowledge engineer with academic background in knowledge
representation and reasoning, currently working as an independent
consultant (http://epistemik.co). My own experience at the intersection of
GraphQL and RDF reaches back to 2017, when I first used it merely to allow
quick and easy transformations from RDF to JSON. Very soon, however, it
became clear there might be a bigger potential in GraphQL, to be used as a
generic, developer-friendly interface for accessing triple stores, which I
believe is currently a major and increasingly recognized use-case that
should hopefully deserve some systematic work from this group. This led to
the development of a PoC tool called HyperGraphQL [1], [2].

Recently, my interest has started shifting (or broadening) towards
use-cases where GraphQL in combination with JSON-LD can be instrumental to
managing connected data distributed across a number of different stores /
services (graphs, documents, search stores, etc.), as I see it as a
recurrent major challenge within projects building (semantic) knowledge
graph-driven applications. This use-case is concerned with different kinds
of CRUD operations and the problems of data validation and
federation, which have been mentioned in that GoogleDoc we passed around
recently. With this application in mind, we've also just started working on
a little open-source project called Staple API [3].

Finally, from the most philosophical perspective, I'm interested in the
hypothesis that GraphQL might actually provide an interesting opportunity
to enable simple and scalable data publishing model for the Web, which
combined with modern developments in the linked data space, such as JSON-LD
and schema.org-like vocabularies, could potentially deliver on some of the
traditional (and endlessly ridiculed) Semantic Web promises (or as Kurt
Kaggle recently wrote "it can bring Semantic Web to the Web"). Some extra
commentary and an example of such an API we've recently exposed for one
open data project can be found here [4], [5].

I'm very much interested in contributing to any efforts undertaken by this
group that could potentially help advance any of these use-cases.

All Best,
Szymon

[1] https://www.hypergraphql.org/
[2]
https://medium.com/@sklarman/querying-linked-data-with-graphql-959e28aa8013
[3] https://staple-api.org/
[4]
https://medium.com/@sklarman/linked-open-statistical-data-served-simply-ead245bf715
[5]
https://medium.com/@sklarman/what-the-semantic-web-can-do-for-graphql-8cfb39971714

On Sat, 15 Feb 2020 at 09:20, Olaf Hartig <olaf.hartig@liu.se> wrote:

> Dear Ruben, all,
>
> I am an Associate Professor at Linköping University, Sweden. Some of my
> research has focused on RDF, Linked Data, and federations of graph data
> sources. An interesting topic in the context of the latter is what type of
> (Web-based) data access interfaces such data sources may provide. Related
> to
> this topic, I started looking into GraphQL, and I have done some research
> on
> different aspects of the GraphQL framework [1,2,3,4]. Currently, we are
> working on a performance benchmark for GraphQL server implementations:
>
> https://github.com/LiUGraphQL/LinGBM/wiki
>
> In the context of the CG, my interest is in making sure that we have a
> solid
> formal foundation for using GraphQL to access RDF data.
>
> Thanks,
> Olaf
>
>
> [1] Olaf Hartig and Jorge Pérez: An Initial Analysis of Facebook's GraphQL
> Language. In Proceedings of the 11th Alberto Mendelzon International
> Workshop
> on Foundations of Data Management (AMW), 2017.
> http://olafhartig.de/files/HartigPerezAMW2017_GraphQL_Preprint.pdf
>
> [2] Olaf Hartig and Jorge Pérez: Semantics and Complexity of GraphQL.. In
> Proceedings of The Web Conference 2018.
> http://olafhartig.de/files/HartigPerez_WWW2018_Preprint.pdf
>
> [3] Olaf Hartig and Jan Hidders: Defining Schemas for Property Graphs by
> using
> the GraphQL Schema Definition Language. In Proceedings of the 2nd Joint
> International Workshop on Graph Data Management Experiences & Systems
> (GRADES)
> and Network Data Analytics (NDA) (GRADES-NDA'19), 2019.
> http://olafhartig.de/files/HartigHidders_GRADES2019_Preprint.pdf
>
> [4] Yun Wan Kim, Mariano P. Consens, and Olaf Hartig: An Empirical
> Analysis of
> GraphQL API Schemas in Open Code Repositories and Package Registries. In
> Proceedings of the 13th Alberto Mendelzon International Workshop on
> Foundations of Data Management (AMW), 2019.
> http://olafhartig.de/files/KimEtAl_AMW2019.pdf
>
>
> On torsdag 13 februari 2020 kl. 16:14:41 CET Ruben Taelman wrote:
> > Dear all,
> >
> > Welcome to the community group on Bridging GraphQL and RDF!
> >
> > As you probably already know,
> > this group has been setup to explore combinations of GraphQL and RDF,
> > and to investigate how these two domains can help each other.
> >
> > Before we start with defining the concrete goals of this group,
> > selecting a chair, and defining the process that will be followed,
> > I suggest that everyone first introduces themselves,
> > and shares with the group what you would like to see as an outcome.
> >
> > Let me start off:
> >
> > I am a (finishing) PhD student at Ghent University, Belgium.
> > My research focuses on publishing and querying Linked Data on the Web.
> >
> > During my research, I have experienced the difficulty developers have
> with
> > writing SPARQL queries. Since GraphQL is much more popular among
> > developers, I tried to lift GraphQL queries to the RDF domain, so that
> they
> > can be used as an alternative to SPARQL queries.
> > This mechanism resulted in GraphQL-LD [1, 2], which combines GraphQL
> queries
> > with JSON-LD contexts.
> >
> > During my work on GraphQL-LD, I quickly noticed that several other
> companies
> > had similar ideas. Last year, I started working on a high-level
> comparison
> > [3, 4] between the approaches that existed back then. Note that several
> new
> > related approaches have been introduced, so my comparison is a bit
> > outdated. As several people (including myself) recognised the need for
> some
> > kind of alignment between these different approaches, I created this
> > community group as an attempt to bring all interested parties together.
> >
> > As an end-goal (possibly as a step *after* this CG),
> > I would like to see some kind of standardization on how GraphQL maps to
> RDF.
> > Given my interest in querying, I would at least like to see this from a
> > querying perspective, so I want some kind of mapping from GraphQL queries
> > to SPARQL queries (or something more generic). I understand that other
> > people in this group are interested in other (non-querying) aspects of
> > GraphQL, and I definitely agree that work should be done for these things
> > as well.
> >
> > [1] https://comunica.github.io/Article-ISWC2018-Demo-GraphQlLD/
> > [2] https://github.com/rubensworks/graphql-ld.js
> > [3] https://rubensworks.github.io/article-w3cdataws2019-graphql/
> > [4] https://www.rubensworks.net/raw/slides/2019/w3c-data-ws-graphql-rdf/
> >
> > Kind regards,
> > Ruben Taelman
>
>
>

-- 

*EPISTEMIK <http://epistemik.co>*

Knowledge Engineering