5 ms·

Is anybody still using SPARQL?

by gozzoo 7y ago

mark_l_watson 7y ago
I am using SPARQL on a commercial product I am developing and also for a future product (I am a solo developer, so one product at a time). As I mentioned in another comment, the SPARQL endpoints for WikiData and DBPedia are fantastic resources, for some projects.
fils 7y ago
Yes.. I work on several projects that leverage SPARQL. The article is also remiss in not mentioning the work the W3C is doing along with Neo4J to do its own alignment (https://www.w3.org/Data/events/data-ws-2019/ https://www.w3.org/Data/events/data-ws-2019/). Indeed, this article seems very self serving in its omissions. There is a follow up meeting planned soon for that too. Also, much of the work in validation (SHACL, Shex) of graphs leverages SPARQL so it's not going anwhere soon. I would like to see it evolve to allow more vertex based searches without the need for extensions though.
- tasogare 7y ago
  From your link "W3C's RDF uses URIs (Web addresses) for nodes and link labels in directed graphs. This has the advantage of enabling them to be dereferenced to obtain further information, making for a Web of linked data. In particular, nodes can be dereferenced to graphs on remote databases." I think spreading those kind of lies[1] if a part of why there is a divide between the W3C (at least the RDF community) and the rest of the word. The W3C should be more transparent about RDF capabilities and realistic about the real power of the Semantic Web. [1] this false because RDF use IRIs not URLs, and not all IRIs are dereferenceable. Moreover, even URLs used as resource id are not constrained to be dereferenceable per the spec (and when they are, you'll get a lot 404 in practice). Also, the same effect can be obtained as easily with properties (key value pair) attached on nodes of graph database.
  - tannhaeuser 7y ago
    I think the reasoning behind RDF using URIs/IRIs for nodes and predicates is that this gives a globally unique naming hierarchy (backed by DNS in turn), such that when combining heterogenous data there's no name clash, and at the same time allows for liberal use in closed DBs via "urn:" URLs. But yeah, if the linked article insinuates that dereferencing RDF URLs is useful or even common, that would be false IMO.
  - hobofan 7y ago
    Yes, thank you! That's one of my biggest gripes with the W3C stack. How am I supposed to build semantic data, if I can't access the semantics and/or they can change or disappear at any time? That has been one of the main motivations why I've been working on a content-addressed semantic data/ontology format[0] with a modern decentrelized stack in mind. [0] https://github.com/rlay-project/rlay-ontology https://github.com/rlay-project/rlay-ontology
  - AtlasBarfed 7y ago
    Yeah, the SPARQL people need to realize that the semantic web was a massive dud in the programming and database market, and a lot of that was overreach, overpromise, and a lack of focus on "real-world" problems. Thus, if someone is looking to unify graph QLs that are in actual use in "business" problems, SPARQL and the overall RDF aren't going to get attention. You can start with the fact that RDF basically assumes you want to globally address all your data with URIs, which will result in ridiculously verbose overhead in naming/addressing. Nevermind the fact that such things basically promise some sort of long term durability that the actual web has shown doesn't exist. After all, today's URI link to URI www.tla.com/link/to/some/data can mean the world wide wrestling foundation one day, and the world wildlife foundation the next. In particular, Gremlin was adopted by DSE / Titan / successor to Titan which ran atop Cassandra for near-limitless scalability. RDF and the Semantic web, while being intended for the massive WWW, seemed to not have any care for demonstrating techniques, queries, and architectures at scale. Likewise, are Datalog and Prolog used extensively?
    - fulafel 7y ago
      Datalog is used fairly extensively in the Clojure world, in Datomic and a handful of other implementations.
bjonnh 7y ago
Yes, it is still really well alive but does not benefit from marketing money, so it flies under the radar. A new version SPARQL1.2 is currently under work through a working group in W3C to address some of the limitations of the current version.
tannhaeuser 7y ago
Yes, it's quite big in bioinformatics, pharma, chem, medicine.

Is anybody still using SPARQL?

by gozzoo 7y ago

Is anybody still using SPARQL?

I am using SPARQL on a commercial product I am developing and also for a future product (I am a solo developer, so one product at a time). As I mentioned in another comment, the SPARQL endpoints for WikiData and DBPedia are fantastic resources, for some projects.

fils 7y ago

Yes.. I work on several projects that leverage SPARQL. The article is also remiss in not mentioning the work the W3C is doing along with Neo4J to do its own alignment (https://www.w3.org/Data/events/data-ws-2019/ https://www.w3.org/Data/events/data-ws-2019/). Indeed, this article seems very self serving in its omissions. There is a follow up meeting planned soon for that too. Also, much of the work in validation (SHACL, Shex) of graphs leverages SPARQL so it's not going anwhere soon. I would like to see it evolve to allow more vertex based searches without the need for extensions though.

tasogare 7y ago
From your link "W3C's RDF uses URIs (Web addresses) for nodes and link labels in directed graphs. This has the advantage of enabling them to be dereferenced to obtain further information, making for a Web of linked data. In particular, nodes can be dereferenced to graphs on remote databases." I think spreading those kind of lies[1] if a part of why there is a divide between the W3C (at least the RDF community) and the rest of the word. The W3C should be more transparent about RDF capabilities and realistic about the real power of the Semantic Web. [1] this false because RDF use IRIs not URLs, and not all IRIs are dereferenceable. Moreover, even URLs used as resource id are not constrained to be dereferenceable per the spec (and when they are, you'll get a lot 404 in practice). Also, the same effect can be obtained as easily with properties (key value pair) attached on nodes of graph database.
- tannhaeuser 7y ago
  I think the reasoning behind RDF using URIs/IRIs for nodes and predicates is that this gives a globally unique naming hierarchy (backed by DNS in turn), such that when combining heterogenous data there's no name clash, and at the same time allows for liberal use in closed DBs via "urn:" URLs. But yeah, if the linked article insinuates that dereferencing RDF URLs is useful or even common, that would be false IMO.
- hobofan 7y ago
  Yes, thank you! That's one of my biggest gripes with the W3C stack. How am I supposed to build semantic data, if I can't access the semantics and/or they can change or disappear at any time? That has been one of the main motivations why I've been working on a content-addressed semantic data/ontology format[0] with a modern decentrelized stack in mind. [0] https://github.com/rlay-project/rlay-ontology https://github.com/rlay-project/rlay-ontology
- AtlasBarfed 7y ago
  Yeah, the SPARQL people need to realize that the semantic web was a massive dud in the programming and database market, and a lot of that was overreach, overpromise, and a lack of focus on "real-world" problems. Thus, if someone is looking to unify graph QLs that are in actual use in "business" problems, SPARQL and the overall RDF aren't going to get attention. You can start with the fact that RDF basically assumes you want to globally address all your data with URIs, which will result in ridiculously verbose overhead in naming/addressing. Nevermind the fact that such things basically promise some sort of long term durability that the actual web has shown doesn't exist. After all, today's URI link to URI www.tla.com/link/to/some/data can mean the world wide wrestling foundation one day, and the world wildlife foundation the next. In particular, Gremlin was adopted by DSE / Titan / successor to Titan which ran atop Cassandra for near-limitless scalability. RDF and the Semantic web, while being intended for the massive WWW, seemed to not have any care for demonstrating techniques, queries, and architectures at scale. Likewise, are Datalog and Prolog used extensively?
  - fulafel 7y ago
    Datalog is used fairly extensively in the Clojure world, in Datomic and a handful of other implementations.

bjonnh 7y ago

Yes, it is still really well alive but does not benefit from marketing money, so it flies under the radar. A new version SPARQL1.2 is currently under work through a working group in W3C to address some of the limitations of the current version.

tannhaeuser 7y ago

Yes, it's quite big in bioinformatics, pharma, chem, medicine.