Real-time Data Browsing with SPARQL

In many cases, good ideas for new features come directly from our end-users. A few days ago, a customer asked for the ability to automatically refresh the SPARQL view whenever the user selects a new resource. This is easy enough to implement, and now available in TopBraid Composer 1.5.1. Look at the following screenshot to see what it does.



Whenever the user selects a different Suburb, the SPARQL window will automatically run the given query and display the matches. This mechanism is triggered if the current query contains the variable ?this. The trick is to automatically bind the ?this variable with the current resource.

This useful mechanism can be used to quickly browse instances by arbitrary queries, e.g. to see how the system would behave during ontology design. Thanks a lot, Geoff, for this excellent idea! We appreciate more input like this...