SPARQL tutorial

In this tutorial, we will use the Jena SPARQL hello world as a starting point. Tested on Apache Jena 4.10.0.

Basic query on rdf/vcard.ttl RDF Turtle data to find the person with full name "John Smith":

sparql --data=rdf/vcard.ttl --query=<( printf '%s\n' 'SELECT ?x WHERE { ?x <http://www.w3.org/2001/vcard-rdf/3.0#FN> "John Smith" }')

Output:

---------------------------------
| x                             |
=================================
| <http://somewhere/JohnSmith/> |
---------------------------------

To avoid writing http://www.w3.org/2001/vcard-rdf/3.0# a billion times as queries grow larger, we can use the PREFIX syntax:

sparql --data=rdf/vcard.ttl --query=<( printf '%s\n' '
PREFIX vc: <http://www.w3.org/2001/vcard-rdf/3.0#>
SELECT ?x
WHERE { ?x vc:FN "John Smith" }
')

Output:

---------------------------------
| x                             |
=================================
| <http://somewhere/JohnSmith/> |
---------------------------------

Bibliography:

UniProt contains some amazing examples runnable on their servers: sparql.uniprot.org/.well-known/sparql-examples/

SPARQL tutorial

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