Final Thoughts
Resources
As a final thought, I would like to share a couple resources that might be helpful for those interested in taking SPARQL practice to the next level (this includes me!) of for the teachers of this course to introduce more practical examples, readings, or tools to give students more practice.
One resource is the book “Learning SPARQL” by Bob DuCharme (http://www.learningsparql.com/index.html). This book has some great explanations with easy-to-understand examples to get users and practitioners in a more comfortable place with SPARQL querying. It also goes into the practicalities of OWL or RDFS inferencing that allows users to rely on implicit relations baked into the ontology. There’s good stuff here for beginners and advanced query people alike.
Another resource I have to offer is not a journal article or book at all. It’s the Apache Fuseki SPARQL server that users can download and install locally to build and practice querying locally created triplestores. The Apache Fuseki application is available for download here: https://jena.apache.org/download/index.cgi. Once you download and run the installation, you’ll need to run the fuseki-server.bat file if you have Windows, and the fuseki-server file if you have a mac or linux computer. After running the application, you’ll need to create a new directory for storing triples inside your apache-jena-fuseki directory. For example, let’s say I call this location “datafolder”. Next, create a folder inside the “datafolder” folder; let’s call it “data”. Once you’ve downloaded Fuseki and create these two folders within the Fuskei installation directory, you can make your way to the fuseki location on the command line. Once there, type:
for Windows type:
.\fuseki-server.bat --update --loc=datafolder /data
for Mac/Linux type:
./fuseki-server --update --loc=datafolder /data
(note the space after datafolder).
When this is run, fuseki will start up and be ready for a request on port 3030 of your computer, accessible through you browser as a GUI. Next you can open a browser window and go to the address http://localhost:3030. Once that’s up and running, you can add a triplestore and begin practicing updating and querying it! I recommend downloading something from the internet and uploading it into Fuseki for practice.