SPARQLpedia: Sharing Semantic Web queries on the Semantic Web

Together with the TopBraid Composer 3.0 beta, TopQuadrant is also launching a new web service called SPARQLpedia. This is a free, public service that hosts SPARQL queries in a searchable repository. Anyone can submit new SPARQL queries. Anyone can search the repository for queries that mention a given namespace, certain resource URIs or have been submitted by certain users. All submitted queries that mention a SPARQL endpoint (FROM clause) can be conveniently executed online with a Run Query button.

The SPARQLpedia repository can be accessed in three ways:

• as a (REST-based) web service from any application
• via an HTML web interface at http://sparqlpedia.org
• using submit and query buttons in TopBraid Composer

Here is a screenshot of the web interface displaying an example query from the repository:

Here is a screenshot of the new SPARQLpedia search view of TopBraid Composer. It shows how users can conveniently store a library of their favorite queries and use the queries from this library with a few mouse clicks.

There are several motivations for us to implement this service. First, I believe that many SPARQL queries are reusable in one way or another - they may demonstrate design patterns or ask common questions. There is a lot of useful knowledge encoded in queries. In the spirit of modern web applications, SPARQLpedia provides a mechanism to share and reuse queries on a global scale.

Second, SPARQLpedia serves as an example application to demonstrate how our TopBraid Live platform and SPARQLMotion can be used to implement RDF-based services. I will provide details on the implementation of SPARQLpedia and its use of SPIN and SPARQLMotion in a follow up posting. Since SPARQLpedia is implemented using SPARQLMotion, any company with a TopBraid Live license can also host their local SPARQL repositories inside of their firewalls to share frequently used queries among team members.