Re: ISSUE-91, ISSUE-92: Should the RDF API have a query() that is capable to send SPARQL requests to remote endpoints

Hi,

Here are six reasons for adding an overloaded rdf.parse(SparqlEndpoint,
query) method that returns a Graph object as result.

1. If you request data about a single subject and request the subject's
URI for RDF data, Linked Data leaves it open to data providers what
triples to return. For example DBpedia won't give you all triples it
knowns about a subject, when requesting it's URI. By using SPARQL queries,
you will receive all the triples you want to have.
2. In cases where a data provider publishes its RDF data just as a single
RDF document, you have to parse the whole document on your own to get the
10 triples you are interested in. A SPARQL query allows you to define a
pattern to just receive these 10 triples.
3. I don't want to parse huge RDF data in Javascript within my browser.
The Browser would just produce a message that a Javascript script runs too
long and hence it would ask me to stop this script.
4. A SPARQL query is nothing more than a single HTTP request. I
implemented hundreds of these requests by using JQuery and JSONP. Each of
it gave me a feeling of having just created a painful hack. By providing a
simple overloaded rdf.parse method, we would create a clean solution on
this problem.
5. This method does not mean to support sparql in our RDF API. It just
adds a standard way to send SPARQL queries to a remote endpoint and
process the results directly in our API. This would just take me a single
line of code.
6. Whenever I built an RDF mashup, I was not interested to aggregate all
existing  information about a set of subjects. In fact I am interested in
adding just some data about these subjects. For example, give me the names
and parties of all US presidents.

In my understanding of an RDF API that facilitates developing RDF
applications in a browser, adding this query support stays within the
scope of this API. :)

Greetings,

Ben


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Received on Thursday, 21 April 2011 20:24:51 UTC