 | Level: Advanced Andrew Matthews , Architect and developer, Freelance
22 Apr 2008
Updated 15 May 2008 The Semantic Web, a knowledge-centric model for the Web's future, supplements human-readable documents and XML message formats with data that can be understood and processed by machines. SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL) is to the semantic Web as SQL is to a relational database. It allows applications to make sophisticated queries against distributed RDF databases, and is widely supported by many competing frameworks. This tutorial demonstrates its use through the example of a team tracking and journaling system for a virtual company.
In this tutorial
This tutorial introduces SPARQL and the data formats it is based on. It also covers the
RDF, RDF Schema, OWL, and Turtle knowledge representation languages. With these
languages, you build ontologies or domain models. For the example used throughout
this tutorial, you'll build the ontologies and queries for a journaling and booking
system to produce semantically tagged twitter-like micro-blogs. You'll query those blog
entries to find those in your company with the skills to make up the team for a project
that you are bidding for. When you complete this tutorial, you will know how to produce RDF and OWL ontologies in the Turtle language. You will know how to host the ontologies using Jena and Joseki and you will know how to query them using SPARQL.
Objectives - An introduction to the semantic Web including RDF, OWL and SPARQL
- How to set up an RDF Triple Store using Joseki
- Writing the SPARQL queries for the journal system
Prerequisites
This tutorial is aimed at developers with little or no experience in producing semantic Web applications. It doesn't require any programming or developer tools, but it does assume some familiarity with Web fundamentals.
System requirements
You will need JavaScript enabled in your browser. You will need the following tools to follow this tutorial:
- Java™ environment—The Java runtime environment is needed to allow you to run Joseki, the SPARQL server.
- Joseki—This is an open source SPARQL server produced by HP. You can get it from http://www.joseki.org/. Follow the links to the download area at SourceForge. Download the latest version of Joseki to your machine, and choose an area to unzip the file to. Take a note of that location, because you will make use of it to create a simple batch file that will fire up the server.
- Jena—The Semantic Web framework (provided as part of Joseki).
- Any text editor.
Duration
1 hour
Formats html, pdf
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