Re: Parsing DBPedia result

The documentation for sparql-client is woeful on this, but the gem actually
does everything you need to do here. The DSL is there to make simple use
cases look Rubyish, but I doubt it'll ever be extended to rubify complicated
queries like unions. You can access the querying and parsing facilities
directly.

ben@ben-2:~$ irb
ruby-1.9.2-p290 :001 > require 'sparql/client'
 => true
ruby-1.9.2-p290 :002 > c = SPARQL::Client.new('http://dbpedia.org/sparql')
 => #<SPARQL::Client:0x80c40588(http://dbpedia.org/sparql)>
ruby-1.9.2-p290 :004 > c.query('ASK where { ?s ?p ?o }')
 => true
ruby-1.9.2-p290 :005 > c.query('select * where { ?s ?p ?o } limit 1')
 => [#<RDF::Query::Solution:0x80759b00({:s=>#<RDF::URI:0x8074a6a0(
http://dbpedia.org/resource/Elizabeth_Peabody__Teacher)>,
:p=>#<RDF::URI:0x8074a2b8(http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#type)>,
:o=>#<RDF::URI:0x80749e58(http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#Thing)>})>]

The result from a select query is an array of RDF::Query::Solutions, which
lets you do things like:
ruby-1.9.2-p290 :012 > result.s
=> #<RDF::URI:0x8074a6a0(
http://dbpedia.org/resource/Elizabeth_Peabody__Teacher)>

Ask queries return true/false, construct/describe return RDF::Repositories
(or maybe RDF::Graphs, I'm not actually sure).

result[:s] should work too.

If you are doing something fancy at the protocol level, you can also do:

SPARQL::Client.parse_json_bindings(a_json_results_string)
=> # an array of RDF::Query::Solutions OR an RDF::Repository OR true/false
and

SPARQL::Client.parse_xml_bindings(an_xml_results_string)
=> # an array of RDF::Query::Solutions OR an RDF::Repository OR true/false

The latter two are what we use for the Dydra client, which needs to support
our authentication methods above and beyond the core SPARQL protocol.

Hope this helps,
Ben


On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 10:03 AM, Arne De Herdt
<arne.de.herdt@tenforce.com>wrote:

> I've tried playing around with it, but I couldn't get it to do what I
> need, cause I rely on UNIONS alot for certain operations.
> At the moment I just have the endpoint return my data as JSON and parse
> that information myself, which seems to work as well.
>
> Arne De Herdt
> Software Engineer .NET/Ruby on Rails
>
> Email: arne.de.herdt@tenforce.com
> Phone: +32 (0)16 31 48 64
> Mobile: +32 (0)473 80 84 89
> Web: http://www.tenforce.com
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ross Singer [mailto:rossfsinger@gmail.com]
> Sent: woensdag 24 augustus 2011 16:22
> To: Tom Morris
> Cc: Arne De Herdt; public-rdf-ruby@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Parsing DBPedia result
>
> It's also worth looking at sparql-client
> (http://sparql.rubyforge.org/client/) although it doesn't appear to
> support more complicated queries, UNIONs, etc., but would definitely
> handle your current queries.
>
> The nice part of this is that it supplies a simple DSL for building your
> queries and also parses the results into native ruby objects.
>
> -Ross.
>
> On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 8:52 AM, Tom Morris <tom@tommorris.org> wrote:
> > [On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 14:37, Arne De Herdt
> > <arne.de.herdt@tenforce.com> wrote:
> >> I’ve just been thrown into a project that requires me to parse
> information from DBPedia based upon certain keywords. The example in the
> demo is the name of the city, which should return me the English
> description of that city for the demo.
> >>
> >> I’ve scrambled my own SPARQL query together for the endpoint at
> DBPedia. I’m by no means experienced in semantics, as I just got plunged
> into this world. My query looks like this:
> >>
> >>
> >> The info returned is what I want to work with.
> >>
> >
> > Hi Arne,
> >
> > You are doing a SELECT query which returns back XML in the SPARQL
> > Query Results XML Format [1] rather than RDF. Unlike RDF, this can be
> > easily parsed using standard XML tools. In Ruby, the best tool for
> > this is Nokogiri [2], which basically gives you a DOM-style object
> > graph for navigating the returned XML.
> >
> > Basically, the SPARQL XML results format is essentially a big table,
> > and isn't RDF data: it's just a list of all the results, much as you
> > might get from a SQL query.
> >
> > Just run the query as an HTTP call (using something like Curb or even
> > open-uri), parse it into Nokogiri, then extract from the XML document
> > the data you need.
> >
> > [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-XMLres/
> > [2] http://nokogiri.org/
> >
> > --
> > Tom Morris
> > <http://tommorris.org/>
> >
> >
>
>


-- 
Ben Lavender | ben@dydra.com | http://dydra.com
twitter/github: bhuga | +15047221016