For this month’s blog entry I originally planned to create a reference for RDF serialization formats. My idea was to create a table listing all the known formats, with links to their specs (when they have one), their age, origin, a sample, and some opinionated comments–for example, why creating new documents in RDF/XML made sense in 1999 but no longer does.

In my book Learning SPARQL I often use a query for all the triples in a dataset (that is, all the triples in the default graph and all the triples in any named graphs) that I now realize needs some revision to be more accurate.

SPARQL Anything is an open source tool that lets you use SPARQL to query data in a long list of popular formats: XML, JSON, CSV, HTML, Excel, Text, Binary, EXIF, File System, Zip/Tar, Markdown, YAML, Bibtex, DOCx, and PPTx. It has a lot of great documentation and features, but I’ll start here with an example of it in action.

For a long time I’ve thought that it would be fun to use SPARQL queries of Wikidata to create music playlists that can be played back. While researching last month’s blog entry Use SPARQL to query for movies, then watch them I learned about the P724 Internet Archive ID property, and that turned out to be an excellent hook for finding Wikidata audio recordings that we can listen to.

I recently learned about WikiFlix, which lets you search for streamable movies on the Internet. It was assembled by Sandra Fauconnier and Magnus Manske. (Magnus played a major role in developing MediaWiki, which I’ve blogged about several times.) Sandra has provided some good background on the history and goals of WikiFlix on Wikimedia.

Wikipedia describes the Billboard Hot 100 as “the music industry standard record chart in the United States for songs, published weekly by Billboard magazine. Chart rankings are based on sales (physical and digital), online streaming, and radio airplay in the U.S.” A song that ranks highly there is a hit song (in the U.S.) by definition. The data goes back to the beginning of the chart’s history in 1958, when Rick Nelson’s Poor Little Fool was the number one song.

I recently did a review of options for creating visual representations of RDF data. I didn’t just want a general visualization tool, but something that understood RDF enough to represent class instances and literal values differently. I will emphasize instances because several tools out there can read RDF schema or ontologies and create a visualization of classes and their relationships and potential properties, but I want to see instances with their property values.