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.

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.

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…

I think I’ve figured it out. (This is a follow-up to my previous post SPARQL and Big Data (and NoSQL): How to pursue the common ground?) Here’s how to sell the Semantic Web and Linked Data visions to the Big Data folk: don’t. Sell them on RDF technology.