Alexandre Passant

As WWW2009 is starting tomorrow, with a tutorial on the Web of Data in the morning and the LDOW2009 workshop the whole day, I'm happy to introduce SPARCool.

SPARCool is a simple webservice (à-la Triplr) that allows to run basic SPARQL queries on any URI that follows some of the Linked Data principles (i.e. being dereferencable and returning RDF information about the entity) thanks to a simple URL pattern: http://sparcool.net/format/predicate[;l=lang]/URI. For instance, as described on the website, http://sparcool.net/j/dbp:abstract;l=en/http://dbpedia.org/resource/Semantic_Web will return (in JSON) answers for the following query:


PREFIX dbp: <http://dbpedia.org/property/>
SELECT ?value
FROM <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Semantic_Web>
WHERE {
<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Semantic_Web> dbpedia:abstract ?value .
FILTER (lang(?value) = "en") .
}


You can get the results in various formats, one of them being HTML (so that results can be included in any webpages), as well as redirecting the the first answer of a query, as in http://sparcool.net/r/foaf:img/http://dbpedia.org/resource/Ramones, useful for images and hyperlinks. SPARCool is powered thanks to roqet wrapped in a PHP script (source-code should be released soon).

If you're attending our (i.e. Michael and myself) "Hello Open World" tutorial tomorrow morning, this is the kind of application you should be able to write after it. And BTW, if you're in Madrid and want to have a chat, I'll be here tomorrow and thursday (for the SemSearch workshop) as well as, obviously, the LOD gathering tomorrow evening.