I have played with SPARQL 1.1’s new property paths features and described them in my book, and I’ve felt that I understood them for a while, but two recent occasions have helped me to appreciate them even more.

People who listen to Jersey City freeform radio station WFMU tend to be a bit fanatical about it. The Wikipedia page on the station quotes the New York Times referring to them as “a station whose name has become like a secret handshake among a certain tastemaking cognoscenti.” It’s not only because of the range of their musical eclecticism, which is an easy game for college and other non-profit radio stations to play; the depth of their commitment and their role in the music…

When I first heard about the SPARQL endpoint for the Europeana aggregation of data about European cultural artifacts, the first example I heard about was an MP3 audio file of a Slovenian version of O sole mio. I happened to be in the middle of packing for a family visit over Christmas and immediately tweeted “Lots of holiday stuff to do, but the new Ontotext Europeana SPARQL endpoint points to MP3s! So tempting…” This past Sunday morning I finally made some time to explore it…