Kingsley Idehen wrote: > Nathan wrote: >> Leigh Dodds wrote: >> >>> Hi all, >>> >>> Yesterday, at the 2nd Linked Data London Meetup, Dave Reynolds, Jeni >>> Tennison and myself ran a workshop introducing some work we've been >>> doing around a "Linked Data API". >>> >>> The API is intended to be a middle-ware layer that can be deployed >>> in-front of a SPARQL endpoint, providing the ability to create a >>> RESTful data access layer for accessing the RDF data contained in the >>> triple store. The middle-ware is configurable, and is intended to >>> support a range of different access patterns and output formats. "Out >>> of the box" the system provides delivery of the standard range of RDF >>> serialisations, as well as simple JSON and XML serializations for >>> descriptions of lists of resources. The API essentially maps >>> parameterized URLs to underlying SPARQL queries, mediating the content >>> negotiation of the results into a suitable format for the client. >>> >>> The current draft specification is at: >>> >>> http://purl.org/linked-data/api/spec >>> >> >> If I may make a suggestion; I'd like you to consider including the >> formed SPARQL query in with the return; so that developers can get used >> to the language and see how similar to existing SQL etc etc.. >> >> For all this middle-ware is needed in the interim and provides access to >> the masses, surely an extra chance to introduce developers to linked >> data / rdf / sparql is a good thing? >> > Of course! > > ODBC / JDBC don't take SQL out of scope. Thus, the EAV graph model > equivalent shouldn't take SPARQL out of scope. > > Entity Framework doesn't take EntitySQL out of scope (this the less > capable SPARQL equivalent in the ADO.NET realm).
Yup, I wasn't going to say anything, but may as well for what it's worth (no disrespect meant, I totally sympathise with what you are all trying to do being in the web service / api land myself for many years). Here's what I see happening: Developers accessing the data through the API, downloading it, parsing it in to an RDBMS using their own table / class structure and then querying it locally with SQL. (And quite possibly then turning it in to a CSV!) I wish I had something useful to say here, after the above, but I don't :( All I can say is that for those who SQL, SPARQL will take about a day to get started with, as probably will the linked data api (after you read the docs and get setup etc). Many Regards, Nathan
