Something that happens to me now and then: I’ll hear that an organization with a lot of interesting data (science, music, whatever) makes the data available on a SPARQL endpoint. I send my browser to the URL listed as the SPARQL endpoint and I see a web form. I enter a simple query on the web form to retrieve a few random triples, click the form’s button, and the results of my query appear. Then I enter fancier queries to explore the endpoint’s data.

I’ve been using the curl utility to retrieve data from SPARQL endpoints for years, but I still have trouble remembering some of the important syntax, so I jotted down a quick reference for myself and I thought I’d share it. I also added some background.