RDF Query

Apparently the anxious type, Greg Williams has thrown together an RDF Query implementation in Perl, with support for the new SPARQL draft as of yesterday.

The library also offers ORDER BY support, something that I’m sure Greg is happy to have for his MT-Redland. Ordering things by date for me is something that I’ve sidestepped, but I’m not looking forward to when I actually have to deal with it.

The code uses Parse::RecDescent to generate a query based only on the SPARQL grammar. Greg mentions that it is slow: most of the time is actually in generating the Query from the Grammar.

If only I was still a Perl hacker… sadly, I’m not, so I suppose I’ll just have to start working on my C in order to help get Redland working with the new draft. (Dave estimates that it will take him about 1.5 months to catch up to the most recent WD of SPARQL.) I’d really love to just be able to use the tools I’ve already written in Python, rather than switching to Perl, or even another backend than Redland. It has worked so well for me so far.

Still, this is the first SPARQL implementation using the new Draft that I’m aware of, even if it is mostly just a hack job, so I think that it’s pretty cool, and my props are out to Greg for his work on it!

One Response to “RDF Query”

  1. kasei Says:

    To be clear, “based only on the SPARQL grammar” isn’t really what happened. It’s “based on the RDQL grammar,” and then hacked up and put back together by looking at examples of new new SPARQL syntax. I need to fix that and, you know, actually look at the SPARQL grammar at some point, but it works on the simple stuff right now.