Welcome to SPARQL

SPARQL: A recursive acronym for SPARQL Protocol And RDF Query Language. SPARQL pronounced Sparkle; RDF an acronym for Resource Description Framework. The Query Language is the SQL style of Query.

SPARQL is built upon the w3c standard for retrieval of information from the web, SPARQL does not Query relational databases or crawl the website, and it is a query language that is used upon an RDF document.

What SQL is to Relational databases, SPARQL is to RDF document; the structured web data.

Ok, what got me into this?

      James will like to know the number of songs each artist has.  The artists are those whose songs were produced by Timbaland". 

I didnt know how to ask google to get me a table with artists and their songs and there is a constraint that these songs were produced by Timbaland.

How about trying to know the type of career people born in a particular age group has and the number of people in such career.

There could be more and more questions we can ask given that there are vast information on the web relating to someone, something company, food, businesses etc.

Welcome to SPARQL.  

In other for us to be able to answer these questions, thanks to Tim Bernee Lee of the WWW, who defined the standard for how documents should be organized using HTML so that it can be accessible through the browser. today we are talking about organizing these accessible documents so that the data withing them can be accessible. hmm?

For it to be possible, the documents must be structured as a semantic web (creating meaning from web documents by identifying notable patterns) and the core technology for this is the RDF.

RDF tends to turn web documents into triples of subject, predicate and object.

For example - Timbaland(subject) produces(predicate) what_album(object).

WHY YOU SHOULD SPARQL THE WEB

EDUCATION:

SPARQL for Education focuses on teaching students the importance of organizing the enormous available data across various web sites on the internet into a decentralized data house or data graph to make it easy for access and retrieval. Sparql for education empowers student the importance of RDF, the URI as well as the way in which information can be organized.

RESEARCH:

SPARQL is the googler’s language for the researcher. Imagine the case where a researcher now has the flexibility in defining and specifying the exact kind of information he wishes to retrieve instead of searching google and returning 27,000,000 results for a particular query.

SPARQL for research saves research time, for example; a researcher wishes to know the various flavours of food chips and the countries where they are well produced and countries that love to eat any type of the flavour so as to aid his export to those countries. Searching Google for this information will only present various kinds of data and the researcher will have to sort through them to shuffle the one he wishes to.

SPARQL also presents the data in a more readable form like a table and these can be exported into various format.

THE LECTURER:

A lecturer or a teacher who wants to presents the topic nutrition to the students and wishes to educate them on the various classes of food, the types of food for each class as well as their mineral combinations. Going through the library and reading all through will be slow and time wasting; more so some data must have been updated about the nutrition classes. Using sparql makes it easy and presentable in tabular form ready to be distributed to all students.

THE INDUSTRY:

SPARQL today is industries own data retrieval play tool, where various answers are derived for business centric questions such as stock information, political information, export etc. helping industries to make decision.