I had thought that “RESTful” meant “easily accessible with an HTTP GET, even when something isn’t HTML”. Shortly after a RESTafarian pointed out that there was more to it than that, I went to Brian Sletten’s excellent presentation REST: Information Architecture for the 21st Century at the Semantic Technologies conference and I learned a lot more about what being RESTful implies. During the presentation I asked Brian whether Roy Fielding’s 2000 doctoral…

I recently wrote about trying SPARQL 1.1 new query features with ARQ, and one thing I briefly tried was the new property paths feature. At the time, the query spec only had a placeholder for property paths, but the new version of it released yesterday has a detailed section on property paths with plenty of examples.

Last April Richard Cyganiak tweeted the following:

At one point in the semantic technologies track of last week’s XML Summer School, I showed a little application I wrote where you enter the names of two film directors on a form, click the search button, and then see a list of all actors who’ve been in movies by both directors. The form calls a CGI script that creates a short SPARQL query, runs it, and generates an HTML page of the results. You can read more about it in the developerWorks article Build Wikipedia query forms with…

When I learned that release 2.8.5 of ARQ implements all of SPARQL 1.1 Query (“except for corner cases of property paths”, and Andy Seaborne recently told me that they’ve finished up that part) I decided to try out some of the SPARQL 1.1 features, and it was all pretty easy. I used ARQ from the command line and went through Lee Feigenbaum’s slides on the status of SPARQL 1.1 as a checklist of things to try. For sample queries and data I tried to use the examples in the…

There are probably dozens of ways to convert comma-separated values to parsable RDF, but I recently came up with one that was so simple that I wanted to share it.