Using SPARQL Query Libraries to Generate Simple Linked Data API Wrappers by Tony Hirst.
From the post:
A handful of open Linked Data have appeared through my feeds in the last couple of days, including (via RBloggers) SPARQL with R in less than 5 minutes, which shows how to query US data.gov Linked Data and then Leigh Dodds’ Brief Review of the Land Registry Linked Data.
I was going to post a couple of of examples merging those two posts – showing how to access Land Registry data via Leigh’s example queries in R, then plotting some of the results using ggplot2, but another post of Leigh’s today – SPARQL-doc – a simple convention for documenting individual SPARQL queries, has sparked another thought…
For some time I’ve been intrigued by the idea of a marketplace in queries over public datasets, as well as the public sharing of generally useful queries. A good query is like a good gold pan, or a good interview question – it can get a dataset to reveal something valuable that may otherwise have laid hidden. Coming up with a good query in part requires having a good understanding of the structure of a dataset, in part having an eye for what sorts of secret the data may contain: the next step is crafting a well phrased query that can tease that secret out. Creating the query might take some time, some effort, and some degree of expertise in query optimisation to make it actually runnable in reasonable time (which is why I figure there may be a market for such things*) but once written, the query is there. And if it can be appropriately parameterised, it may generalise.
Tony’s marketplace of queries has a great deal of potential.
But I don’t think they need to be limited to SPARQL queries.
By extension his arguments should be true for searches on Google, Bing, etc., as well as vendor specialized search interfaces.
I would take that a step further into libraries for post-processing the results of such queries and presenting users with enhanced presentations and/or content.
And as part of that post-processing, I would add robust identification of entities as an additional feature of such a library/service.
For example, what if you have curated some significant portion of the ACM digital library and when passed what could be an ambiguous reference to a concept, you return to the user the properties that distinguish their reference into several groups.
Which frees every user from wading through unrelated papers and proceedings, when that reference comes up.
Would that be a service users would pay for?
I suppose that depends on how valuable their time is to them and/or their employers.