Getting Started With SPARQL, Sandboxing

Question

I'm a firm believer in learning a platform or technology by playing with it. So I've kind of glanced at SPARQL and thus far haven't really gotten to into it because it just ... looks daunting (as does everything at first).

I'd like an environment with a couple of documents that I can cross reference and query. My temptation is to do SQL like things such as joining a city to it's home country - but maybe that's the wrong frame of mind. I've looked at the examples on dbpedia and right of the bat there's question marks, 5 namespaces, angle brackets and other hoopla.

http://dbpedia.org/snorql/ looks like a good place to play.

Anyone have some experiences to share? Any resources in particular that really launched your learning?

Answer 1

I've heard that the ARQ SPARQL tutorial is a useful start. As you've found, dbpedia is a daunting data set to start with, but sparql.org also provides a very simple dataset to try querying online.