Federated SPARQL queries in your browser

Dear SemWebbers,

For many years, this community has done excellent work on Federated Querying, mostly in the domain of SPARQL Endpoints. However, despite these great advancements, we were asking ourselves why we didn't execute such queries yet. Also, the SERVICE keyword has been around for a while, but doesn't seem to pop up that much.

Therefore, we tried looking at Federated querying from the practical perspective, based on our recent efforts for alternative client-server trade-offs with http://linkeddatafragments.org/. The result is a Federated SPARQL query processor that simply runs in your browser and is directly usable by all. We hope this can serve as a new base for existing federation techniques and more. 

You can find this browser client here: http://client.linkeddatafragments.org/, and we've listed some queries below: 

== Authors of works in the Harvard Library and their VIAF ID - http://bit.ly/harvard-viaf ==
This query connects authors from the Harvard Library, which don’t have a persistent ID, to VIAF, which has a unique identifier for each author. The match is based on name and birth date to avoid false positives.

== Writers born in Stockholm and their works - http://bit.ly/writers-stockholm ==
This query looks up people who are writers in DBpedia, filtering them based on birth place (also from DBpedia), and then fetches their works from VIAF.

== Works in Harvard Library by Swedish Nobel Prize winners - http://bit.ly/swedish-nobel-harvard ==
This query finds all Swedish Nobel Prize winners from DBpedia, and selects their name in“last, first” format from VIAF. Based on this name, we look up books by these authors in the Harvard Library.

Or simply use the browser client to query any of the 600.000 datasets on http://lodlaundromat.org/wardrobe/. Just add as many Triple Pattern Fragment interfaces as you want to the "Choose datasources" field.

For more detail, Ruben Verborgh has reported this on his blog: http://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2015/06/09/federated-sparql-queries-in-your-browser/.
We would love to hear your comments, questions, ideas and/or feedback!

Kind regards,

Miel Vander Sande
Researcher Semantic Web - Linked Open Data
Multimedia Lab [Ghent University - iMinds]

T: +32 9 33 14893

Received on Thursday, 11 June 2015 13:33:13 UTC