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

Hi all,

I am Víctor Mireles. I have worked as an industry researcher in the
Semantic Web world, and have also experience with development of
microservice-oriented architectures. I have participated in the
construction of several federated repositories, both for comercial and
academic purposes. In this setting, I have encountered the problems of
federated data access, and how to autoconfigure a solution based on
RDF-based metadata. Since access to data is increasingly being wrapped
behind REST APIs, I believe that GraphQL can work as a nice
replacement/extension to Ontology Based Data Access. So, to be  specific, I
see potential avenues in the combination of GraphQL and RDF graphs where
the nodes represent data sources and their structure (columns for tables,
keys for json/xml, etc., datatypes, foreign keys, etc.).

Nice to meey you all, and looking forward to interesting discussions!

Víctor

On Thu, 13 Feb 2020 at 16:15, Ruben Taelman <ruben.taelman@ugent.be> 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 comparison is a bit outdated.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
>


-- 
____________________________________________________
Víctor Mireles

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