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

Hi Ruben, all,

I am an engineer at TopQuadrant. I have worked on a number of RDF-related specifications at W3C, including the database-to-RDF mapping language R2RML, and RDF 1.1 Concepts. I’m interested in data models and mappings between them. I’m also interested in making RDF accessible to wider audiences. GraphQL access to RDF intersects with both topics.

TopQuadrant has a software platform built on RDF. It has a GraphQL interface to the data in the platform. The mapping between the RDF and GraphQL models is expressed as annotations on a SHACL model of the RDF data.

I’d like this group to list, document and compare the various GraphQL-over-RDF approaches that have been created by different parties so far. I hope that the group’s work will help me understand how different use cases have led to the design of these different approaches.

Richard


> On 13 Feb 2020, at 15:15, 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 Note that several new related approaches have been introduced, so my comparison is a bit outdated.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