Lou Reed

And New York City.

(To listen to while you read this: The Blue Mask.) New York City helped to define who Lou Reed was, but since I first became aware of him in the mid-seventies, Lou Reed played a big part in defining what New York City was to me. It’s difficult for me to picture the city without him.

Making charts out of SPARQL query results with sgvizler

Embed a query in your HTML, name an endpoint, and pick a chart type.

I finally got around to trying sgvizler, and I wish I’d done so earlier. Once your HTML page references the sgvizler JavaScript and CSS, you can specify a query to send to any SPARQL endpoint you want and then see a chart of the query results on that web page. Scroll down a bit on sgvizler’s Google code home page and you’ll see a nice range of available chart types.

Using VALUES to map values in a SPARQL query

The VALUES keyword: even better than I thought.

Note: Ebook versions of the “raw, unedited” version of the new expanded edition of my book Learning SPARQL are now available on O’Reilly’s website, and the cooked, edited version (not much different, really) should be available in all formats within a few days. While this edition adds coverage of the VALUES keyword, I came up with the example below too late to include it.)