A little over a year ago, in a blog entry titled SPARQL and Big Data (and NoSQL), I wrote this:

Google once developed a simple environment called Google App Inventor for easy development of native Android apps. After they announced that they would discontinue support and open source it in 2011, the MIT Center for Mobile learning picked it up, so it’s now the MIT App Inventor. (Its Wikipedia page has a nice summary of its history.) I played with it a bit and found it pretty easy to build apps for my phone, even an app that used an RDFS model to drive a user interface. My simple…

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.

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.)

I’m very pleased to announce that O’Reilly will make the second, expanded edition of my book Learning SPARQL available sometime in late June or early July. The early release “raw and unedited” version should be available this week.

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…