AM5: Introduction to SPARQL - It's a Query Language AND a Protocol

SPARQL seems pretty straightforward. It’s just a query language, right?

While that is true, it is much more. As one of those silly self-refential acronyms, SPARQL is both a query language and a protocol. Both have gone through significant enhancements in the most recent specifications and most of the Semantic Web tools out there support these new features.

If you are new to SPARQL, this talk will lay a solid foundation for understanding the Semantic Web. If you have used SPARQL before, this talk will catch you up on the new features as well as perhaps some usage patterns you might not have seen before.

We will use both command line tools and the Stardog environment for demonstrating the query language, protocol and how inferencing can interact with standard SPARQL capabilities.

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. He is a system architect, a developer, a mentor, and a trainer. Brian has been speaking about REST, the Semantic Web, and other technologies around the world as part of conferences such as NoFluffJustStuff, JavaOne, Jazoon, the Spring Experience, the Rich Web Experience, and Museums on the Web. Brian has written for DevX's Semantic Web Zone, JavaWorld, and has contributed chapters to O'Reilly Media's "Beautiful Architecture" and "97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know." He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and currently lives in northern California. He consults and speaks frequently about next generation technologies around the world.

Al Baker is VP of Enterprise Solutions at Clark & Parsia, where he leads the enterprise consulting group, delivering full lifecycle enterprise information integration solutions using semantic technology. He focuses on using leading semantic technology, such as the Stardog RDF database, and integrating it with customer environments and third party software solutions. With a passion for open source, Al leads the Stardog language and framework bindings for Groovy, Clojure, and Spring integration. Prior to Clark & Parsia, he led software developments teams at Booz Allen Hamilton and Bell Labs.