RDF.rb 0.3.5 and SPARQL 0.1.0

I added some minor updates to RDF.rb and re-issued versions 0.3.5 for the rdf and linkeddata gems. These updates are mostly to better support HTTP content negotaion and to find appropriate readers and writers based on file extension, mime-type, and content sniffing. There are also some minor fixes to aid jRuby and Ruby 1.9.3 support.

More notably, I’ve released 0.1.0 of the [SPARQL][] gem. The logical behavior is unchanged from the previous release, but it now includes Rack and Sinatra support to easily create middleware for a SPARQL endpoint. When used with the Linked Data gem, this includes a range of RDF serializations for DESCRIBE and CONSTRUCT queries. It also adds HTTP Accept headers to outgoing requests using FROM and FROM NAMED for RDF/XML and Turtle.

As a simple example, the Sinatra example in the README performs a simple query against a small repository:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -rubygems
require 'sinatra'
require 'sinatra/sparql'

repository = RDF::Repository.new do |graph|
  graph << [RDF::Node.new, RDF::DC.title, "Hello, world!"]
end

get '/sparql' do
  SPARQL.execute("SELECT * WHERE { ?s ?p ?o }", repository)
end

A minimal SPARQL endpoint can be described as follows:

# Sinatra example
#
# Call as http://localhost:4567/sparql?query=uri,
# where `uri` is the URI of a SPARQL query, or
# a URI-escaped SPARQL query, for example:
#   http://localhost:4567/?query=SELECT%20?s%20?p%20?o%20WHERE%20%7B?s%20?p%20?o%7D
require 'sinatra'
require 'sinatra/sparql'
require 'uri'

get '/' do
  settings.sparql_options.merge!(:standard_prefixes => true)
  repository = RDF::Repository.new do |graph|
    graph << [RDF::Node.new, RDF::DC.title, "Hello, world!"]
  end
  if params["query"]
    query = query.to_s =~ /^\w:/ ? RDF::Util::File.open_file(params["query"]) : :URI.decode(params["query"].to_s)
    SPARQL.execute(query, repository)
  else
    service_description(:repo => repository)
  end
end

This can be run using ruby -rubygems example.rb, or with rackup or shotgun as rackup example.rb

To load a complete to the query repository, or a full dataset including multiple context, load the repository as follows:

repository = RDF::Repository.load("http://path-to-repo")

This will incur a large startup time for each request, but you can also use a persistent store such as rdf-mongo: repository = RDF::Mongo::Repository.new() This will instantiate a persistent MongoDB store, which can be initialized one time using RDF::Mongo::Repository.load. Subsequent instantiations will use the persistent storage, and have better query performance for larger datasets.

For a more complete implementation, see the RDF Distiller running at http://rdf.greggkellogg.net/sparql and freely available to download and modify for your own purposes.

Follow up questions to public-rdf-ruby.