I think it’s obvious that SPARQL and other RDF-related technologies have plenty to offer to the overlapping worlds of Big Data and NoSQL, but this doesn’t seem as obvious to people who focus on those areas. For example, the program for this week’s Strata conference makes no mention of RDF or SPARQL. The more I look into it, the more I see that this flexible, standardized data model and query language align very well with what many of those people are trying to do.

I thought it was pretty big news for the semantic web world when IBM announced that release 10.1 of their venerable DB2 database manager could function as an RDF triplestore, but it seems that few others—not even, apparently, IBM staff responsible for marketing semantic technology—agreed with me. More on this below.

We should give flickr some credit for providing an API that lets us download the metadata we’ve entered about our pictures (for example, titles, descriptions, and membership in custom sets such as XML Summer School 2011 or Artsier Stuff) but that metadata all refers to pictures on flickr’s servers. What if I want to use blurb.com to print a hardcopy album of one of these sets? Do I have to download that set’s pictures from flickr, even though I already have them on a hard disk,…

SPARQL 1.1 Update’s COPY and MOVE operations let you copy and move triples between named graphs or between the default graph and a named graph. These operations first appeared in the May 2011 SPARQL 1.1 Update draft, but with the recent 0.2.2 snapshot release of Fuseki I find I can try their full range of capabilities a little more than I could with the 0.2.1 incubating release of Fuseki.

Once, at an XML Summer School session, I was giving a talk about semantic web technology to a group that included several presenters from other sessions. This included Henry Thompson, who I’ve known since the SGML days. He was still a bit skeptical about RDF, and said that RDF was in the same situation as XML—that if he and I stored similar information using different vocabularies, we’d still have to convert his to use the same vocabulary as mine or vice versa before we could use our…

One of the new SPARQL 1.1 specifications is the SPARQL 1.1 Graph Store HTTP Protocol, which is currently still a W3C Working Draft. According to its abstract, it “describes the use of HTTP operations for the purpose of managing a collection of graphs in the REST architectural style.” Recent releases of Sesame support it, so I used that to try out some of the operations described by this spec. I managed to do GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE operations with individual named graphs, so that…

Jo Rabin’s “Mobile is not The Future (It’s Now)” presentation in the Trends and Transients portion of this year’s XML Summer School (and the reading he suggested, such as this Tomi Ahonen blog post) got me thinking much harder about mobile delivery. One of my first ideas was how easy the jQuery Mobile Javascript library could make it to deliver SPARQL query results, and in less than 30 minutes I wrote an XSLT stylesheet that can take the SPARQL Query Results XML Format…