0

I'm writing my master thesis about linked data in archives and I was wondering if you could help me with a question. I've read this book about LD and came along this sentence:

SPARQL is the query language of RDF triple stores, but the query language goes beyond the generation of lists. It can also be used to assert new RDF statement and have them saved to the store.

I'm not quite sure if I understood the second part of it. Is it true that SPARQL works like a reasoner to get new statements (inferences?) out of RDF-graph? Or how should I understand the sentence above?

Stanislav Kralin
  • 11,070
  • 4
  • 35
  • 58
Xandyxoxox
  • 21
  • 1
  • 4
    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because Stack Overflow is a platform for asking specific programming questions about specific programming problems. https://stackoverflow.com/help You might be able to get away with asking this question on https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com – Rob Feb 08 '18 at 13:11
  • Yes, you understand it well, (try to see some examples: https://developer.marklogic.com/features/semantics/inference-examples) but SO has some serious policy on asking generic questions. So, I can't help you more than that. – Alex Feb 08 '18 at 13:14
  • thanks anyway. I thought I'd be ok to ask the question even if I'm not a programmer but it seems to be a very strict community here ;) – Xandyxoxox Feb 08 '18 at 13:16
  • 2
    [Similar question](https://stackoverflow.com/q/46161217/7879193) was not closed... @Xandyxoxox, in the future, feel free to ask questions related to your thesis on https://opendata.stackexchange.com. – Stanislav Kralin Feb 08 '18 at 22:20
  • thank you Stan! I will check out that page! – Xandyxoxox Feb 09 '18 at 10:20

1 Answers1

3

The more complete quotation is:

SPARQL is the query language of RDF triple stores, but the query language goes beyond the generation of lists. It can also be used to assert new RDF statement and have them saved to the store. It provides the means for answering Boolean questions or performing mathematical functions.

In this paragraph, the author lists different forms of SPARQL queries:

As for reasoning, many triplestores are able to infer new statements from existing ones.
New statements can be materialized (saved in a triplestore) or not.

There exist official SPARQL 1.1 Entailment Regimes. The document defines:

  • what does it mean — to query under entailment;
  • different common kinds of entailment.

In short, new statements can be generated using:

  • OWL axioms serialized into RDF and stored in same triplestore,
    OWL constructs can be supported more or less partially;

  • inference rules written in more or less common rule languages.

As an exercise, you can try GraphDB Cloud and play with different rulesets.

See also this answer for some examples.

Stanislav Kralin
  • 11,070
  • 4
  • 35
  • 58