SPARQL Web Pages made easy

SPARQL Web Pages (SWP, aka UISPIN) is a templating language for HTML and XML formats that operate on RDF data. In a nutshell, SWP makes it possible to embed SPARQL expressions and queries directly into web page snippets, and to link an RDF or OWL ontology with such SWP snippets. SWP can also be used to generate JSON callback results to support Ajax-style patterns. This basically means that application developers can cover the whole software stack ranging from model to control to view with RDF-based representations only.

At TopQuadrant, we have meanwhile made substantial use of SPARQL Web Pages in internal and customer-facing projects, and have introduced several SWP enhancements with TopBraid 3.5. One thing that several people asked for was SWP support for stand-alone web pages that are not necessarily linked to specific classes in an ontology. In response to this, we have introduced *.swp files, which can be used like PHP or JSP documents with a TopBraid server.

In order to create such SWP files, go to File > New > SPARQL Web Pages file. This will create a stub file with some content that will help you get started:

Through its base platform Eclipse, TopBraid Composer includes a powerful HTML editor, and TBC 3.5.1 includes syntax highlighting for SWP built-ins (see above, you may need to associate *.swp files with the HTML content type in the Eclipse preferences as described in the TBC Help).

As soon as you have created this file, you can immediately execute it via the personal TopBraid Live server that is built into TopBraid Composer. Just visit http://localhost:8083/tbl/test.swp in your browser:

The example above takes one argument (test) and inserts this into the greeting. The expression {= ?test } will insert the current value of the SPARQL variable ?test into the output document. In our example, ?test is fetched from the URL arguments via the built-in function ui:param(). The demo page then creates a simple loop over all instances of kennedys:Person in the query graph and inserts them into an unordered HTML list. The actual query graph is specified using the ui:setContext tag - if this isn't present it will use the default graph.

For a more complete live demo of SWP, visit http://spinservices.org:8080/spin/doc.swp providing documentation of the GoodRelations ontology:

For anyone with experience in hand-editing HTML and JSP or PHP, SPARQL Web Pages should look quite familiar. In fact, SWP borrows ideas from other well-known languages such as loops, assignments, if-then-else branching and user-defined tags, but is 100% SPARQL. With RDF nodes as first-class citizens, this language is IMHO an attractive alternative to projects that use RDF as their primary data representation or integration format.